ENGL 395 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Manichaeism, Lifeworld, The Negotiation
7 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
Review of what we have gone over so far: Went through the conventional elements of fantasy. A few key concepts: going past the surface when you encounter otherness. The relationship of the fantast story to the real world: history, objects, commodities, dynamics around otherness, colonialism, race, gender, alliance, collectivity, smartphones, technology, Christianity, religion, spirituality, psychological maturation, manichean allegory, etc. This is the story that is rightly credited with really establishing the fantasy genre in the twentieth century: tolkien is the tree and the ones to follow are many different branches and leaves. Tolkien makes very big claims about fantasy and his novel can be seen as practicing what he preaches in terms of his theory of fantasy. For tolkien, fantasy is much more than escape from the realistic objects that populate other literary forms; rather it is an attempt to restore to us knowledge of, and contact with a more significant underlying reality, the real itself.
