1 00:00:05,790 --> 00:00:13,320 [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. 2 00:00:14,790 --> 00:00:16,349 Well, thank you very much, everyone. 3 00:00:16,350 --> 00:00:23,670 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. 4 00:00:24,150 --> 00:00:26,610 So I'm going to make some points and then these ten minutes, 5 00:00:26,610 --> 00:00:32,700 which just give you an introduction to something, um, a writer, a text or a topic and etc. 6 00:00:32,940 --> 00:00:41,070 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. 7 00:00:41,550 --> 00:00:45,360 Um, and I think what you can say is that there are two standard approaches, 8 00:00:45,360 --> 00:00:52,019 and one is that long view which Adam picks up in his book, The Historical Precedents to Fantasy Literature. 9 00:00:52,020 --> 00:00:55,979 And the second is the critical framework for analysing text. 10 00:00:55,980 --> 00:01:00,660 And to a certain degree, uh, the summer school concentrates on the long view. 11 00:01:00,930 --> 00:01:07,409 But if you want to start looking at, uh, critical frameworks such as Mendelssohn already mentioned Syracuse. 12 00:01:07,410 --> 00:01:11,729 Good word, but I don't know what it means. Or Brian after fuzzy sets, etcetera. 13 00:01:11,730 --> 00:01:20,790 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, 14 00:01:20,790 --> 00:01:24,840 or you could look at a fantasy literature, text or writer. 15 00:01:25,110 --> 00:01:30,510 And for those of you who are eagle eyed, it is, of course, a homage to Terry Pratchett. 16 00:01:30,810 --> 00:01:34,080 Who would have loved it. So this I'm going to call the Discworld framework. 17 00:01:35,550 --> 00:01:42,870 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. 18 00:01:42,870 --> 00:01:48,479 So the first one is the definition every critical, uh, text or scholarly text, 19 00:01:48,480 --> 00:01:54,930 and I can't remember if Adam does it in his, starts off by trying to define what exactly is fantasy literature. 20 00:01:54,930 --> 00:01:58,319 And we can go through a series of these and I will put up the reading list. 21 00:01:58,320 --> 00:02:07,320 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. 22 00:02:07,320 --> 00:02:13,590 Is it impossible? Is there some element in the text that the writer which we believe would be impossible, 23 00:02:13,800 --> 00:02:20,190 certainly in our current understanding of the way the world works, and that comes through again and again. 24 00:02:21,520 --> 00:02:27,640 However, once we move into defining things, we're starting to work in the murky world of genre studies, 25 00:02:28,030 --> 00:02:31,780 um, and genre studies and fantasy literature spawned subgenres. 26 00:02:32,140 --> 00:02:41,410 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. 27 00:02:41,770 --> 00:02:46,150 Uh, the ones which are here higher epic fantasy, Lord of the Rings or Martin. 28 00:02:46,600 --> 00:02:50,809 Um, low fantasy. Is it sometime called a sword and sorcery? 29 00:02:50,810 --> 00:02:54,400 Be things like the Conan books from years ago? 30 00:02:54,550 --> 00:03:02,050 Magical realism aka as a Borgias or romantic, which is the latest one which a lot of people, uh, are writing. 31 00:03:02,350 --> 00:03:04,990 So my De is definition. 32 00:03:05,860 --> 00:03:15,010 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. 33 00:03:15,160 --> 00:03:21,820 And also I have some problems with the way she sometimes mixes the definitions with actually what she's talking about, 34 00:03:21,880 --> 00:03:29,709 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? 35 00:03:29,710 --> 00:03:34,930 And I'm just choosing three here intrusive, liminal, and I'm talking about secondary worlds. 36 00:03:35,230 --> 00:03:40,120 So an intrusive is where in my view, the fantasy intrudes into normality. 37 00:03:40,330 --> 00:03:47,190 There is a normal world quite happily carrying on, but sometimes the things intrude in and invade Harry Potter, 38 00:03:47,190 --> 00:03:50,800 with the two worlds sort of kind of living coexisting. 39 00:03:50,840 --> 00:03:53,810 But one doesn't know about the other, but a writer, which we're not gonna talk about. 40 00:03:53,830 --> 00:04:03,460 H.P. Lovecraft, where the horror, the supernatural, fantastic elements intrude in and make everyone question, uh, the future of humanity and so on. 41 00:04:03,760 --> 00:04:07,900 Liminal is where fantasy, in my view, lives just is part of it. 42 00:04:08,140 --> 00:04:12,720 So Jonathan Strange Mr. Norrell fantasy is an accepted part of the world. 43 00:04:12,730 --> 00:04:19,750 It just lives, lives together. And then secondary world, what it's called immersive, I believe Mendelsohn calls, 44 00:04:19,930 --> 00:04:24,580 but immersive to me is really moving is in other directions about the theory of immersion. 45 00:04:25,150 --> 00:04:28,870 Uh, is where there is the completely separate world. And Adams already mentioned Narnia. 46 00:04:28,870 --> 00:04:34,089 And I think what's exactly very interesting in as the secondary world entirely separate, 47 00:04:34,090 --> 00:04:37,740 like Earthsea, or are they linked to our world via the portal? 48 00:04:37,750 --> 00:04:43,450 So a writer you are going to meet tomorrow, if you haven't read Katherine Rundell is Impossible Creatures. 49 00:04:43,450 --> 00:04:51,069 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, 50 00:04:51,070 --> 00:04:56,590 which is still part of our world. But clearly they are going through a portal into the secondary world. 51 00:04:58,980 --> 00:05:02,820 How is the fantasy revealed to the reader? Again, Adam touched on this. 52 00:05:03,180 --> 00:05:08,999 Um, and this, I think, is where we often get something like the everyman character is, as Anna mentioned, 53 00:05:09,000 --> 00:05:18,270 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. 54 00:05:18,270 --> 00:05:23,700 And it's a very clever tactic, because it does allow you to sort of gradually reveal the fantastic elements. 55 00:05:24,900 --> 00:05:28,290 My essay for Discworld is setting. What is the milieu? 56 00:05:28,320 --> 00:05:33,330 What's the historical social setting of it? Um, primarily of interest in secondary world. 57 00:05:33,330 --> 00:05:40,230 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. 58 00:05:40,500 --> 00:05:44,940 But in a secondary world, what can we identify with the historical setting? 59 00:05:45,720 --> 00:05:52,500 Can we locate it in terms of the time and place that we might know in the history of of our world? 60 00:05:53,430 --> 00:05:55,890 Does it repurpose an existing mythology? 61 00:05:55,920 --> 00:06:04,350 You will see many fantasy texts which are picking up things from maybe Old Norse, Celtic, classical mythology and repurposing them. 62 00:06:04,980 --> 00:06:07,230 And there are all kinds of reasons for that. 63 00:06:08,510 --> 00:06:13,100 And the question which I think Adam already posed, and I suspect by the end of today, you'll know the answer. 64 00:06:13,460 --> 00:06:16,640 Why do so many fantasy techs use medieval settings, 65 00:06:16,940 --> 00:06:23,329 particularly associated with Western Europe and Tolkien and Morris and people like that are a lot to thank for this, 66 00:06:23,330 --> 00:06:27,470 but also the medievalism movement of the 19th century as well. 67 00:06:27,800 --> 00:06:33,380 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. 68 00:06:34,310 --> 00:06:35,810 My C is. Characterisation. 69 00:06:35,810 --> 00:06:43,910 Characterisation in fantasy literature often gets a bit of a kicking because people don't think fantasy writers write particularly good characters. 70 00:06:44,300 --> 00:06:50,930 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, 71 00:06:51,140 --> 00:06:56,510 are indistinguishable from each other apart from the colour of their coats, cloaks or one of them's fat. 72 00:06:56,690 --> 00:07:04,340 Um, and Thorin may be feeling Keeley or slightly younger, but characterisation certainly in The Hobbit of those, is not particularly good. 73 00:07:05,710 --> 00:07:10,790 Think about the book. Do we have a sole protagonist or do we have a fellowship? 74 00:07:10,810 --> 00:07:14,799 Is is the driving force of trying to achieve whatever the quest might be? 75 00:07:14,800 --> 00:07:23,590 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, 76 00:07:23,590 --> 00:07:32,080 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. 77 00:07:32,740 --> 00:07:34,899 Uh, sometimes you just don't find anything about them. 78 00:07:34,900 --> 00:07:43,390 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. 79 00:07:44,500 --> 00:07:48,400 Um, do we know what they think, feel, react? I've mentioned Lovecraft. 80 00:07:48,430 --> 00:07:53,830 You really don't know anything about what Lovecraft characters are doing, apart from the fact they're about to go mad. 81 00:07:54,340 --> 00:07:57,819 You have very little character insight because he's not bothered about that. 82 00:07:57,820 --> 00:08:03,100 He's bothered about what this says about the state of the world in the 20s, and it ends and so on. 83 00:08:03,940 --> 00:08:11,169 And then, um, start thinking in fantasy. It is a bit of a problem with it that we get character types or character stereotypes, 84 00:08:11,170 --> 00:08:15,159 and people reach for the standard stock characters which appear. 85 00:08:15,160 --> 00:08:22,990 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. 86 00:08:24,040 --> 00:08:33,820 The interesting thing about fantasy is, of course you can use race as a mode or a way of portraying characteristics. 87 00:08:34,420 --> 00:08:37,809 Um, these again go into stereotypes. 88 00:08:37,810 --> 00:08:45,340 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. 89 00:08:45,820 --> 00:08:53,350 But you, you can use or people use these sort of races now to sort of try and convey characteristics. 90 00:08:53,350 --> 00:08:56,380 But people challenge that, of course, because it comes into some of them, 91 00:08:56,560 --> 00:09:00,580 some of the criticisms you can get of certain writers about their use of race. 92 00:09:01,060 --> 00:09:04,540 And then the other thing which is quite common in fantasy is the doubling of characters. 93 00:09:04,690 --> 00:09:10,059 Where you will have a juxtaposition, will have one character not very well developed, behaving in one way, 94 00:09:10,060 --> 00:09:14,799 but somewhere in the text you will have a secondary character behaving in exactly the opposite. 95 00:09:14,800 --> 00:09:20,440 And you, the reader, trying to put those two together. And this all stems from some ideas in medieval literature. 96 00:09:21,430 --> 00:09:28,960 Um, my W is worldbuilding, which is the create the art of creating the believable world that a reader can relate to. 97 00:09:29,260 --> 00:09:33,010 Everything you can cover everything in your book. Flora. Fauna, language. 98 00:09:33,010 --> 00:09:36,160 Geography. Social setting, governance. Economics. 99 00:09:36,370 --> 00:09:44,800 How do you if you are creating fantastical elements, but particularly with the secondary world, make it believable or understandable to the reader? 100 00:09:45,370 --> 00:09:50,710 Um, and the famous quote from George Martin is, well, what was Aragorn's tax policy? 101 00:09:51,520 --> 00:09:54,610 And you may think, well, I don't really care what Aragorn's tax policy. 102 00:09:54,610 --> 00:10:00,519 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? 103 00:10:00,520 --> 00:10:03,610 Well, Tolkien creates a world, but it isn't fleshed out completely. 104 00:10:03,940 --> 00:10:09,100 There are questions we need to answer. Well, I'm not entirely certain we do need to answer them, but there we are. 105 00:10:09,970 --> 00:10:19,000 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, 106 00:10:19,030 --> 00:10:26,499 one character speaks to another and gives the info done, which is complaints about the character receiving the information already knew it. 107 00:10:26,500 --> 00:10:31,690 The character portraying the information had absolutely no reason to say it to them. 108 00:10:31,690 --> 00:10:35,530 It's entirely there for you as the reader. Um, so beware of that. 109 00:10:36,790 --> 00:10:40,890 My. Why did they write this book in the first place? 110 00:10:40,910 --> 00:10:44,480 What are they trying to say? Um, well, let's be honest about it. 111 00:10:44,540 --> 00:10:49,400 A reason for writing fantasy literature is because there's money in them that hills. 112 00:10:49,430 --> 00:10:55,940 It is incredibly popular. So it may just be, you know, people are writing or wrote it because they wanted to get some money. 113 00:10:56,490 --> 00:11:05,270 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. 114 00:11:05,270 --> 00:11:10,280 But there's no doubt he and his colleagues in the inklings just liked what they had read, 115 00:11:10,280 --> 00:11:13,070 and therefore wanted to sort of reproduce books that they wanted to read. 116 00:11:14,390 --> 00:11:23,330 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, 117 00:11:23,390 --> 00:11:28,550 limits in something which they want to portray, that they think is either right or wrong and accentuate it. 118 00:11:30,200 --> 00:11:37,279 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, 119 00:11:37,280 --> 00:11:40,820 that you can go into a fantasy world and look at something, 120 00:11:40,970 --> 00:11:47,870 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. 121 00:11:47,870 --> 00:11:52,279 So it might be that they're trying to portray a theme or they might be trying to rebalance something. 122 00:11:52,280 --> 00:11:59,629 So we've mentioned already that that there is this breaking of the Western medieval tradition in fantasy literature, 123 00:11:59,630 --> 00:12:06,290 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 124 00:12:06,290 --> 00:12:09,410 maybe your own cultural background or different cultural backgrounds and so on. 125 00:12:10,790 --> 00:12:14,210 So my R is roots. Um. 126 00:12:15,330 --> 00:12:21,710 And you may. You may start reading fantasy books and you go, oh, I know exactly what this character's going to do. 127 00:12:21,720 --> 00:12:28,410 I know exactly what this character is. Uh, and we hear about what you may have heard about the Mary or Marty Su character, 128 00:12:28,410 --> 00:12:35,520 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. 129 00:12:36,210 --> 00:12:40,830 You'll start to see very, very familiar tropes and motifs and plot structures in these. 130 00:12:40,830 --> 00:12:43,649 And this is another area which we tried, um, didn't mention, I think, 131 00:12:43,650 --> 00:12:49,260 but which we would be looking at in terms of roots and that's morphology of folktales, etc. 132 00:12:49,260 --> 00:12:54,600 And I've put up a few of the key theorists there who've sort of seen patterns emerging in. 133 00:12:55,980 --> 00:12:59,520 Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Uh, my el is lore. 134 00:12:59,550 --> 00:13:03,660 How does magic appear in the, uh, fantasy world and fantasy texts? 135 00:13:04,440 --> 00:13:11,519 And my D is depth. How does the writer portray to you that this is a believable world? 136 00:13:11,520 --> 00:13:16,079 And I've just put up Rebecca Yarris Fourth Wing because it's a popular book at the moment. 137 00:13:16,080 --> 00:13:21,510 And you will see one of the key things that she does at the beginning there is does the map it's there, 138 00:13:21,690 --> 00:13:29,970 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. 139 00:13:30,810 --> 00:13:36,870 I'm going to leave it there in terms of the fact that my Discworld is run out with a D, 140 00:13:37,410 --> 00:13:40,190 but the road goes ever wrong would be picking this up on day three. 141 00:13:40,200 --> 00:13:46,650 Fan fiction transmedia storytelling about how we're breaking down the boundaries of the authorial intention text. 142 00:13:47,130 --> 00:13:54,300 And there, I believe, is the reading or some of the reading which I would recommend you get to. 143 00:13:54,300 --> 00:13:57,720 The slides are being recorded so you can go and have a look at them. 144 00:13:57,990 --> 00:13:58,380 Thank you.