Genre Conventions: What is fantasy?

[Wild Gazebo]

"The "the past was better and the future can only get worse" trope is not exclusive to fantasy. Nor is the "the future can only be better than today" trope exclusive to science fiction. You could write a fantasy in which the future means better things, and you could write a science fiction tale in which things are worse than they wore before, and will continue to get worse."

I don't think you can based on your own definition. Magical thinking is an absolute or truth meaning that once it is attained there can be no more. The idea of the past and future doesn't deal with the actuallity of past or future but the mentality of the current culture...which closley mimics your idea. So, that your magical thinking will always have a limit and be discovered quickly, become abused, and then lost (possibly). The idea that the past contains the truth is more acurately described in your post...since past simply refers to the limits of knowledge and understanding of advancement as opposed to the actual chronology of the setting. I guess I didn't describe it very well.

It is not a matter of better, but an ingrained assumption that there are limits...in fact, you have it, pretty much dead on...you explained it better than me. But, you must now add the modifiers of phantasy and science fiction trappings to define your parimeters...including the much touted tech vs fantastic.

As for science fiction thinking being non-absolute, I would suggest that it doesn't contain any perceivable limits...meaning that there is always an expansion of ideas and understanding...which is probably what you said...but I'm getting really tired. I should go to bed, I'm not thinking straight. But, yes. I think you have a grasp of what Genre Theory suscribes as the difference between phantasy and science fiction. But, the other trappings are important...just like defining other genres. Yeah, I gotta go...I can barely type. I'll look on this thrwead tomorrow.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Sophists in the sense that they were simply teachers...if very biased and elite.

And arch-conservative in the sense that the simplest form of modern entertainment would set their moral radar on fire. I mean, Plato felt that leaning to read was going to far...let alone writing fantastical fiction that served no obvious moral or educational means.

...better, but...





On a seperate note:

And yes, that is the major malfunction of genre theory--and why I feel new genre theory will eventually eclipse compostion and rhetoric and move more directly into literature.

First:

hmmm.

Second:

he should go for it. As Aristotle said the proof of a good theory is that it's teachable. A good internet theory has a couple of other correlaries, but I think he should go for it. This thread isn't going anywhere, we've got time.

 

[Wayside]

If you are truely interested in the "thisness of things in general" and are bored with Plato and his sycophants, and the contextual placement of structualism, post-structualism, and to an extent post-modernism (cringe...in the sense of reduction of ideology) take a tip-toe through Heidegger's work...and really any other existentialist based philosophers who deal with 'reality'...but Heidegger especially. I feel the development of the thingliness of things in regard to self (and the thingliness of self ) to be a breath of fresh air compared to the concerns of academics hell bent on classification and pidgeonholing. Though, more than likely you have already taken a gander. Probably, MORE than, more than likely now that I think about it.

Haha yeah, my copy of Being and Time is well worn . Don't let Akrasia hear about that though. I mentioned I think it was Deleuze in a thread a while ago, and he said something to the effect that anything south of Oxbridge was a waste of time. Actually, I have been following Heidegger back and reading Parmenides and Heraclitus, which is a very interesting way to get into haecceity if you have any Greek (or even not, the Phoenix Pre-Socratics series is quite good in terms of literalness). But in any case after Heidegger's "Identity and Difference" I think Deleuze's Difference and Repetition is monumental in terms of the sameness/difference dynamic that controls the West's way of organizing information in, for example, genres (too many people in America got their first taste of Deleuze through the Guattari collaborations, which are admittedly intentionally anti-academic, but he's really starting to be recognized for the epochal thinker he was now). Actually, a really great "introductory" essay to the academic side of this debate is either the Preface or the Introduction (I forget which) to Foucault's The Order of Things, which is at its heart a history of the conditions under which our various ways of organizing information came about and then were abandoned in favor of other, sometimes totally contradictory ways.

As for Joshua, I'm not sure what line you are refering to...Gadamer?! I must be off kilter.

Oh I meant that in a complementary way. Earlier when he criticized Celebrim's reading of a book he said something to the effect that Celebrim had had his interpretation in mind before reading and had forced the reading to correspond to the interpretation instead of vice versa. Strictly speaking, of course, most of us no longer believe in anything like an "aesthetic distance," as it used to be called, so it isn't possible to build genre totally from text anymore than it is to build text totally from genre; each is always to some extent fore-given to the other, as Dr. Strangemonkey argued early in his GnG thread. But I still heard an echo in Joshua's argument that reminded me of this (pg. 267 of Truth and Method if you have a copy):

For it is necessary to keep one’s gaze fixed on the thing throughout all the constant distractions that originate in the interpreter himself. A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there.

That's why I was surprised by his disdain for criticism, since here and in many other places he's already doing, in a loose messageboard way, what critics do. My guess is that he's just got a bad taste in his mouth from reading some Cleanth Brookes or something .

I actually get the feeling Joshua would really like Searle's work on social reality, if he isn't already familiar with it. Searle's an accessible writer and an analytic thinker, so I think he would satisfy Joshua's scientific mind (and he also has done a lot of work in A.I. and cog. sci.), and at the same time the whole "act" approach, whether to language or things like genre, is consosnant with Joshua's view that all interpretations are opinions with no absolute fact of the matter to be right or wrong about, so really we can only satisfactorily define fantasy or science fiction by agreeing on definitions for them; like any other word, there is no underlying metaphysical fact, only an interpretive strategy.

Nice talkin' ta ya.

You too. Always nice to find people with similar interests. Beyond gaming and all that, I mean .

 

[Desdichado]

And again, I have already addressed this point. I heard you the first time. I refuted the point. I don't and never have expected you to accept what I have to say, but I do expect that if you are going to continue to debate me that you would offer some counterpoint to my rebuttle. So again, Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a racist.

You indeed said something about it, but you didn't refute it. You also ignored what's actually in the text, like Esmerelda, whom I pointed out, who defies your statement that "racial stereotypes" are merely the result of culture. You make a convincing case around the red and green men of Mars, but like I said, ignore everyone else Burroughs wrote about. But you keep making the case about red and green men, which I've never once disputed.

In any case, the entire ERB line of thought is a tangent, we're wrangling about details, and you're not really addressing what I'm trying to say about it anyway. I've grown weary of the ERB discussion. If having the last word means anything to you, I'll gladly concede it. I won't make any further replies to ERB related discussion.

Thank you. I'm not sure the folks down in the literature department would agree with you, but I'm giving it the old college try. It's not really my field, and I thank to one whose field it is that it shows. But, I guess that's irrelevant since as far as you seem to be concerned the fact that I'm using anything like it at all seems to immediately disqualify my opinion.

How can an opinion be disqualified? I'm mistrustful of a methodology that relies on interpretive opinions, and then trying to derive definitions therefrom. Just because a connection, or symbolic link can be drawn doesn't mean that it should. Your interpretation of Rand al'Thor; saying that he literally is Christ, is a perfect example. He saves the world and he sheds his blood. That makes him Christ? That's pretty tenuous. Certainly in the case of the latter feature, many people have done that, and we don't know at this point if Rand will die at the end of the series or not. Does anyone who saves the world automatically become Christ, or at least a Christ figure? How about the fact that Rand al'Thor, or more properly his former self Lews Therin Telamon destroyed the world as it was known 3,000 years ago? Last I checked, Christ also wasn't a conquering figure, nor was he supposed to die in battle against the Devil. He certainly didn't get it on with three hot chicks who were falling all over him, nor did he have two companions anything like Perrin or Mat who were essential to his success. He had a people, but the Jews and the Aiel have very little in common, and the Aiel accept Rand (for the most part) while the Jews famously did not. Yet you ignore these not-insignificant discrepancies with Christ as an iconic figure, and focus on the "well, he'll save the world and shed his blood."

Pressing that argument a little --although not much-- you've also cast most games PCs as Christ figures. You've cast most comic book characters are Christ figures. You've cast almost every protagonist in almost every epic fantasy ever written as Christ figures. Freakin' Elminster is a Christ figure; he's saved the world --more than once-- and he's lost hit points.

Do you see why I have little patience with your methodology? You can craft a symbolic link, sure. I can craft symbolic links with practically every fiction I've ever read. I can draw up a detailed point by point comparison of Jason Bourne of The Bourne Identity and Oddyseus if I wanted, but I consider that to be a waste of my time. Just because I can make these comparisons doesn't mean that I should, or that anyone else should pay attention to them. Beyond a certain point of near allegory-like one-to-oneness, symbolic interpretation breaks down to just some guy spouting off. Some other guy can (and quite often does) spout off something completely different, and he's no less (or more accurately, no more) accurate than the first. Both are certainly valid interpretations of the text, as are many others, but they're useless in terms of defining the texts, or more especially the genre to which the text belong, and frankly, they don't mean much to anyone besides the person who formulated the opinion in the first place.

Why do you think your understanding of what the author intended is so superior to mine?

I never claimed to have any understanding of authorial intent. In most cases, authorial intent is impossible to divine, which is why I favor a method of analysis that doesn't rely on it at all. I'm talking about defining the genre based on what's in the story. Authorial intent is immaterial.

Boy is that going to come back to haunt you.

I really don't think so.

 

[Desdichado]

EDIT: By the time I posted this, it was meaningless in the context of the rest of the thread. Nevermind. Nothing to see here...

 

[mythusmage]

The "the past was better and the future can only get worse" trope is not exclusive to fantasy. Nor is the "the future can only be better than today" trope exclusive to science fiction. You could write a fantasy in which the future means better things, and you could write a science fiction tale in which things are worse than they wore before, and will continue to get worse.

I don't think you can based on your own definition. Magical thinking is an absolute or truth meaning that once it is attained there can be no more. The idea of the past and future doesn't deal with the actuallity of past or future but the mentality of the current culture...which closley mimics your idea. So, that your magical thinking will always have a limit and be discovered quickly, become abused, and then lost (possibly). The idea that the past contains the truth is more acurately described in your post...since past simply refers to the limits of knowledge and understanding of advancement as opposed to the actual chronology of the setting. I guess I didn't describe it very well.

Magical thinking doesn't really mean that all knowledge is already known. After all, it is always possible for new revelations to occur. And each new revelation could be used to improve life. While the knowledge or understanding is absolute, it is only absolute in a narrow sense. In effect the new revelation makes the understanding, the knowledge more comprehensive.

Then you have those situations where the new revelation apparently contradicts the old revelation. What really happens is that the new knowledge supplants the old. What was once true is no longer true.

Or, what is true for another is not true for you. That is the essential property of individual understanding, of personal revelation. How you see the world, how you understand things determines what is true and what is not true in your case. This is the heart of magical thinking, the idea that it's all valid.

It is not a matter of better, but an ingrained assumption that there are limits...in fact, you have it, pretty much dead on...you explained it better than me. But, you must now add the modifiers of phantasy and science fiction trappings to define your parimeters...including the much touted tech vs fantastic.

But there you're dealing with the paint instead of the framework. In my definition what matters is not what you include in your tale, but how what you include is handled. In a fantasy a spaceship travels through space because that's what spaceships do. In science fiction a flying carpet flies through the air through the use of a technology which allows the manipulation of gravity for a desired effect.

As for science fiction thinking being non-absolute, I would suggest that it doesn't contain any perceivable limits...meaning that there is always an expansion of ideas and understanding...which is probably what you said...but I'm getting really tired. I should go to bed, I'm not thinking straight. But, yes. I think you have a grasp of what Genre Theory suscribes as the difference between phantasy and science fiction. But, the other trappings are important...just like defining other genres. Yeah, I gotta go...I can barely type. I'll look on this thrwead tomorrow.

I would say, no perceivable limits that we can see. As our understanding grows we learn there is more to a subject than we know. Add the fact that our ability to understand is likely to grow in the future, we'll be able to comprehend far more than we do now.

Genre trappings serve more as stage dressing than any other purpose. Really, they tend more to limit than define. You see 'flying carpet' and you think fantasy, even when the item follows scientific principles in its realm of existence. 'Spaceship' on the other hand means science fiction, even when it works in a magical fashion. My purpose in formulating my description of fantasy (my definition if you like) the way I have is to get past the trappings. To open up the possibilities of what fantasy (and science fiction, and horror, and romance etc.) can be. My concern is not with what the story is about, but how the story is about it.

 

[Desdichado]

I think that is absolutely correct. Speaking only for myself, I'm a Socratic thinker by nature, and so I desire a definition of science fiction and fantasy which is all encompansing and encompanses not only all the science fiction that is, but all the science fiction that ever will be.

That'll be some trick, based on your definition. The main fault I've always found with it is that there is no way it can be all encompassing, except by your forcing works to fit it even when they do not. I'm not even the only one who's thrown out examples of works that do not fit your definition, and to say that no one ever could write a work of fantasy that didn't fit your definition is frankly absurd.

I believe that despite his protests to the contrary, the method he espouses is actually a more arbitrary means of classification than mine because depends precisely on things which are to internal to the reader and even on things as fickle as the reader's emotional responce to the work.

The mind boggles. Do tell.

Which is what I intend to show next. Not that I haven't already done this several times, but I guess I'm going to have to do this formally and at more length, because Joshua is not even offering an attempt to refute my objections but still parading out his claims as if I haven't made any argument against them.

Not refuted your objections...

I most certainly have. You didn't think my refutation was credible, but I've thought the same of your arguments, naturally.

 

[S'mon]

Last I checked, Christ also wasn't a conquering figure, nor was he supposed to die in battle against the Devil. He certainly didn't get it on with three hot chicks who were falling all over him...

We-ell...

Can we just say this is Religion and lock this thread now? Please?

 

[Desdichado]

Just out of curiosity, what was the last "academic literary criticism" you read? I'm curious because most of your posts in this thread have more in common with contemporary literary criticism, for which considerations like theme and symbolism are vastly outdated, than Celebrim's, so I find your resistance to it odd.

That's entirely possible. I took some English lit classes in college some 10-15 years or so ago, but it wasn't my major, or even my minor, and I don't know how old the textbooks or methodology we used was. It's entirely possible that my perception of English lit in general is frozen in time and it has since moved on completely past my perception of it.

In fact, I would quite hope so, as is probably obvious from my posts.

 

[Desdichado]

We-ell...

Can we just say this is Religion and lock this thread now? Please?

Maybe that would be for the best... it'll take some time to respond to Celebrim's longer post; I've barely had time to read through it once as it is.

I would just like to say that I wish he had posted something like that from the get-go, though. That's good discussion there. Naturally, I still disagree with it, but I can't easily dismiss it, as he makes some excellent points.