[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] My name's Rose. Rose Pallister. Um, and I'm a professor of 18th century studies and the faculty of English at the University of Oxford.
Um, and I have been teaching here for some 30 years.
Um, probably the most relevant piece of information about me is I taught a masters course for several years, uh,
called The Fictions of Fantasy, that looked at 18th century fantasy literature or the idea of fantasy in 18th century fiction.
Well, I suppose because I'm working 19th century literature.
Um, for me it's particularly linked with theories of the imagination in the 18th century and fantasising that kind of the,
the original meaning is to make something visible, to make something apparent.
Um, and it's linked to the imagination and, and I'm really interested in 18th century theories of mind.
And one of the series of mind that's very, you know,
built building on John Locke and sort of explicated in Addison's essays on the pleasures of the imagination,
is this idea that, um, you have a kind of primary sense experience, and then you revisit the experience itself in your imagination.
Um, so the, the thing that stimulated you is absent, but you remake that experience,
and that can often be through a kind of imaginative construction of another world,
which is a sort of, um, which stimulates you in a similar way to the way that landscape or um,
uh, yeah, landscape or sort of particularly visual excitement.
The 18th century is probably the world of the moment at which the visual becomes the primary sense.
So I suppose I think of fantasy as being a sort of strongly visual secondary sense experience, um, often communicated through art.
Um, particularly interested in the ways that literary arts can, um, give you that embodied experience.
I gave a talk today on fairy tale, so it's at the front of my mind. But I do think the late 17th century.
I think that group of writers shall shell people.
I'm a huge fan of Marie Donoghue, and I don't think people have read enough of her one to tales.
They're more widely available now than they were. Um, Donkey skin is one of the great fairy tales,
and I think she's extremely good at capturing that kind of passage through sort of sorrow to triumph that the fairy tale can often tell.
Um, so I guess I would think if you were going to go and read, I would say, look at that.
Some great little collections of wonder tales, um, from the 17th century.
Um, nap translations from this little paperback just called Wonder Tales.
When I talk to my lecture. I am making my way slowly through the Outlander series and I am enjoying those.
And I do think they're a kind of fantasy fiction. I suppose what I would say is I'm really interested in historical fiction that
is coming very close to what we would now call sort of speculative fiction.
So the idea of a kind of, um, the past being another world that you can, um, reinvent.
Um, I'm not a great fan of Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels, per se, but I think the Bridgerton television series is a wonderful bit of fantasy,
actually, with re narrates the Regency period in terms of a sort of very different way of thinking about racial politics and that kind of.
Um, Cross-racial casting has been really interesting to me.
Hamilton, I think, is an amazing piece of fantasy.
Um, it's a fantasy musical, but it's just kind of re narrates the past by sort of doing something slightly,
sort of very wilfully anachronistic, which is shocking.
That makes you also sort of look again at things that seem familiar.
And I think maybe that is a really important aspect of fantasy is to give you, is to get you again in that very strongly visual sense.
Let's look again at what we thought we knew. Retell it from a different angle.
Repopulate it. And that will, so long as we bear in mind that sort of fantastic nature.
Do you think and don't think that it's somehow giving us a sort of legitimate or true representation?
It gets you to see and think differently. Maybe that's one of the best qualities of fantasy.
Well, I suppose listening to some of the talks today,
I was wondering whether in some ways it might become so dominant a category that it loses its category of sort of distinctiveness.
I mean, I think it's such a familiar mode now.
You know, it's a place where people experiment, um, that I sort of think the kind of complaint that it's sort of devalued or not recognised.
I just I don't recognise that myself now. I think it's become quite literary and thoroughly mainstream, really.
Um, I think a lot of those boundaries between sort of, um, um, oral, um, written forms are breaking down anyway.
Um, I sort of I really like the fact that so much of, uh, writing now happens in these sort of virtual spaces.
Um, so, um, I mean, I think it's going to flourish, but I think it's in some ways it's sort of at the point when something acquires enormous power,
it doesn't need that sort of doesn't need to be marked off and made categorically distinct.
And I think that's likely to happen. I mean, I suppose I.
I do. I have. I do think of it in general ways, and I do think of it as a kind of, um, I don't even think that's a literary style, really.
Uh, I was most influenced by. I don't know whether anyone's talked about him is a theorist called Slavoj Zizek that I said he.
Okay. Um, and he talks he has an essay called Traversing the Fantasy.
Uh, and he has a he's a sort of psychoanalytic cultural critic, a lot of his works in film.
But one of his key arguments is that we need to think.
Again about fantasy. And he said, what fantasy is, is a sort of story that covers up a void.
So he he sort of actually, when we traverse a fantasy, we travel through fantasy.
So we recognise, um, that there is no actual true object of desire, that we're always just in pursuit of that object.
So I kind of like that insight, and I think perhaps it's a way that we ought to be thinking about fantasy more, um, as a kind of.
Story that is trying to cover up the impossibility of our meeting our desires, rather than a story that's expression of the desire.
If that makes sense, as a distinction. Um, and that means for Zizek, that actually means sort of staying with the story, uh,
and not expecting it to deliver some kind of absolute sort of consolation or substitution of what you cannot have.
There's a way in which science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction can be a really good way of addressing those concerns.
Um, sort of giving you another world to look at it from.
One of my ex-students, actually, Laura Bagley's just published a Ya fiction called dirt, which I've just started reading and I'm really enjoying.
It's a kind of a sort of eco parable romance.
Um. Clever and persuasive and thoughtful.
So I think and I think that was what I was trying to touch on that in an odd way,
the supernatural can remind you of your responsibility to the natural world,
to the environment, to the world around you in a way that perhaps sort of eco politics doesn't kind of, uh, fails to sometimes fail to do that.
It can be so earnestly, uh, moral and self sacrificing that it doesn't spark people's imaginations to care about,
um, the ecology and the environment as well. So, yeah.
So I, I'm kind of hoping that that might be the, uh, another potential, um, future.
For fantasy, sort of encouraging us to think responsibly about environment.
And creatively about it as well.