Critical Approaches to Fantasy (short talk) - Stuart Lee

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] And now I'm going to hand over for the first of our ten minute lectures to Professor Stuart Lee, who's going to give us a little bit of theory. Well, thank you very much, everyone. And as Caroline said, so we mix the structure of this up so that we have these more plenary talks and wonderful to follow Adam.

So I'm going to make some points and then these ten minutes, which just give you an introduction to something, um, a writer, a text or a topic and etc. So I just want to kind of follow up on some of the points that Adam was making about theory and theoretical approaches to fantasy literature. Um, and I think what you can say is that there are two standard approaches, and one is that long view which Adam picks up in his book, The Historical Precedents to Fantasy Literature.

And the second is the critical framework for analysing text. And to a certain degree, uh, the summer school concentrates on the long view. But if you want to start looking at, uh, critical frameworks such as Mendelssohn already mentioned Syracuse. Good word, but I don't know what it means. Or Brian after fuzzy sets, etcetera.

It might give you, uh, some roots in. But I'm going to come up with a framework and which I'm going to post nine areas that I think we could look at, or you could look at a fantasy literature, text or writer. And for those of you who are eagle eyed, it is, of course, a homage to Terry Pratchett. Who would have loved it. So this I'm going to call the Discworld framework. Um, and it's a series of, of of things you might want to consider when you are looking at, uh, a writer or a text.

So the first one is the definition every critical, uh, text or scholarly text, and I can't remember if Adam does it in his, starts off by trying to define what exactly is fantasy literature. And we can go through a series of these and I will put up the reading list. Sorry, uh, towards on the last slide of some of the, some of the writers, the thing that leaps out about how you define fantasy is impossible.

Is it impossible? Is there some element in the text that the writer which we believe would be impossible, certainly in our current understanding of the way the world works, and that comes through again and again. However, once we move into defining things, we're starting to work in the murky world of genre studies, um, and genre studies and fantasy literature spawned subgenres.

Um, so and this is a list of all kinds of ones that you may or may not have heard of, that people try to sort of type there or place their text in. Uh, the ones which are here higher epic fantasy, Lord of the Rings or Martin. Um, low fantasy. Is it sometime called a sword and sorcery? Be things like the Conan books from years ago? Magical realism aka as a Borgias or romantic, which is the latest one which a lot of people, uh, are writing. So my De is definition.

My I picks up what Adam said in terms of our Mendelsohn, and I think it is a great book Mendelsohn's book, but I'm simplifying it here slightly. And also I have some problems with the way she sometimes mixes the definitions with actually what she's talking about, the plot structure, so it doesn't quite work. But what I think here is how does the fantasy, the fantastical elements relate to reality? And I'm just choosing three here intrusive, liminal, and I'm talking about secondary worlds.

So an intrusive is where in my view, the fantasy intrudes into normality. There is a normal world quite happily carrying on, but sometimes the things intrude in and invade Harry Potter, with the two worlds sort of kind of living coexisting. But one doesn't know about the other, but a writer, which we're not gonna talk about. H.P. Lovecraft, where the horror, the supernatural, fantastic elements intrude in and make everyone question, uh, the future of humanity and so on.

Liminal is where fantasy, in my view, lives just is part of it. So Jonathan Strange Mr. Norrell fantasy is an accepted part of the world. It just lives, lives together. And then secondary world, what it's called immersive, I believe Mendelsohn calls, but immersive to me is really moving is in other directions about the theory of immersion. Uh, is where there is the completely separate world. And Adams already mentioned Narnia.

And I think what's exactly very interesting in as the secondary world entirely separate, like Earthsea, or are they linked to our world via the portal? So a writer you are going to meet tomorrow, if you haven't read Katherine Rundell is Impossible Creatures. Of course, there is a portal in which the protagonist goes through the mirror of the lake in Scotland and then ends up in the archipelago,

which is still part of our world. But clearly they are going through a portal into the secondary world.

How is the fantasy revealed to the reader? Again, Adam touched on this. Um, and this, I think, is where we often get something like the everyman character is, as Anna mentioned, the hobbits in the Lord of the rings, who really are like us, and they are finding their way into Middle-Earth as much as surprises as we are. And it's a very clever tactic, because it does allow you to sort of gradually reveal the fantastic elements. My essay for Discworld is setting. What is the milieu?

What's the historical social setting of it? Um, primarily of interest in secondary world. Because if it's a if it's real world, if it's Victorian London, for example, in the horrors or fantastical elements coming in, we identify with that. But in a secondary world, what can we identify with the historical setting? Can we locate it in terms of the time and place that we might know in the history of of our world? Does it repurpose an existing mythology?

You will see many fantasy texts which are picking up things from maybe Old Norse, Celtic, classical mythology and repurposing them. And there are all kinds of reasons for that. And the question which I think Adam already posed, and I suspect by the end of today, you'll know the answer.

Why do so many fantasy techs use medieval settings, particularly associated with Western Europe and Tolkien and Morris and people like that are a lot to thank for this, but also the medievalism movement of the 19th century as well. But it's not the nor it's, I should say that it's not completely the norm now and things being broken or changed. My C is. Characterisation.

Characterisation in fantasy literature often gets a bit of a kicking because people don't think fantasy writers write particularly good characters. Um, and you'll see. Sorry I have picked if you can't see that picture there, the dwarves in The Hobbit, which, to be perfectly honest, are indistinguishable from each other apart from the colour of their coats, cloaks or one of them's fat.

Um, and Thorin may be feeling Keeley or slightly younger, but characterisation certainly in The Hobbit of those, is not particularly good. Think about the book. Do we have a sole protagonist or do we have a fellowship? Is is the driving force of trying to achieve whatever the quest might be?

And that goes back to early classical mythology, which in that they may pick up night from those soul superheroes to something like in The Argonauts, where we start to get the idea of a group of band together who are defeating or trying to achieve the quest, or the main protagonist flawed. Uh, sometimes you just don't find anything about them. But in modern reading, we would expect some flaws to emerge in our main characters in some sort of development of it, so it's worth seeing that.

Um, do we know what they think, feel, react? I've mentioned Lovecraft. You really don't know anything about what Lovecraft characters are doing, apart from the fact they're about to go mad. You have very little character insight because he's not bothered about that. He's bothered about what this says about the state of the world in the 20s, and it ends and so on.

And then, um, start thinking in fantasy. It is a bit of a problem with it that we get character types or character stereotypes, and people reach for the standard stock characters which appear. So whilst we mentioned Tolkien, if we mention Terry Brooks in the same breath, he's just lifting character types from Tolkien and replaying them. The interesting thing about fantasy is, of course you can use race as a mode or a way of portraying characteristics. Um, these again go into stereotypes.

So we know if you're going to get a dwarf, they're going to be pretty grumpy and, you know, and like to hit people or something like that. But you, you can use or people use these sort of races now to sort of try and convey characteristics. But people challenge that, of course, because it comes into some of them, some of the criticisms you can get of certain writers about their use of race. And then the other thing which is quite common in fantasy is the doubling of characters.

Where you will have a juxtaposition, will have one character not very well developed, behaving in one way, but somewhere in the text you will have a secondary character behaving in exactly the opposite. And you, the reader, trying to put those two together. And this all stems from some ideas in medieval literature. Um, my W is worldbuilding, which is the create the art of creating the believable world that a reader can relate to.

Everything you can cover everything in your book. Flora. Fauna, language. Geography. Social setting, governance. Economics. How do you if you are creating fantastical elements, but particularly with the secondary world, make it believable or understandable to the reader? Um, and the famous quote from George Martin is, well, what was Aragorn's tax policy? And you may think, well, I don't really care what Aragorn's tax policy.

You kind of get a bit of a glimpse of it in the appendices. Well, maybe it's tax policy, but of course, what are you saying there is? Well, Tolkien creates a world, but it isn't fleshed out completely. There are questions we need to answer. Well, I'm not entirely certain we do need to answer them, but there we are.

Um, the difficulty is how you convey your world to the reader, and you will come across numerous fantasy books where within the first chapter, one character speaks to another and gives the info done, which is complaints about the character receiving the information already knew it. The character portraying the information had absolutely no reason to say it to them. It's entirely there for you as the reader. Um, so beware of that.

My. Why did they write this book in the first place? What are they trying to say? Um, well, let's be honest about it. A reason for writing fantasy literature is because there's money in them that hills. It is incredibly popular. So it may just be, you know, people are writing or wrote it because they wanted to get some money. Uh, the second thing I think is because people enjoy the type of things, uh, Tolkien kind of once said or refers to in mythology for English.

But there's no doubt he and his colleagues in the inklings just liked what they had read, and therefore wanted to sort of reproduce books that they wanted to read. You will often get fantasy portraying a dystopian view of the world or a utopian view of the world, so it allows the author to engage without limits, limits in something which they want to portray, that they think is either right or wrong and accentuate it.

It can emphasise a key theme. There may be an area we've already talked about ecology, and this is where tokens theory of recovery comes in, that you can go into a fantasy world and look at something, and then actually when you step out, you look back at the real world, what's surrounding you, and you get a better insight into that. So it might be that they're trying to portray a theme or they might be trying to rebalance something.

So we've mentioned already that that there is this breaking of the Western medieval tradition in fantasy literature, such as Rebecca Queen's The Poppy War. We are trying to say something a bit more and make this a more rounded genre about maybe your own cultural background or different cultural backgrounds and so on. So my R is roots. Um. And you may. You may start reading fantasy books and you go, oh, I know exactly what this character's going to do.

I know exactly what this character is. Uh, and we hear about what you may have heard about the Mary or Marty Su character, that sort of where the character just does something absolutely extraordinary to kind of to get the author out of a hole or it's just a quest. You'll start to see very, very familiar tropes and motifs and plot structures in these.

And this is another area which we tried, um, didn't mention, I think, but which we would be looking at in terms of roots and that's morphology of folktales, etc. And I've put up a few of the key theorists there who've sort of seen patterns emerging in. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Uh, my el is lore. How does magic appear in the, uh, fantasy world and fantasy texts? And my D is depth. How does the writer portray to you that this is a believable world?

And I've just put up Rebecca Yarris Fourth Wing because it's a popular book at the moment. And you will see one of the key things that she does at the beginning there is does the map it's there, but then starts to cite fictitious texts to try and give you the idea that there is a background to this world that you were engaging in. I'm going to leave it there in terms of the fact that my Discworld is run out with a D, but the road goes ever wrong would be picking this up on day three.

Fan fiction transmedia storytelling about how we're breaking down the boundaries of the authorial intention text. And there, I believe, is the reading or some of the reading which I would recommend you get to. The slides are being recorded so you can go and have a look at them. Thank you.