Ruptures of the real : rethinking fantasy in fiction and contemporary culture

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the development of fantasy in fiction and contemporary culture in terms of common underlying strategies and in the light of my assertion that reality is ruptured by means of the fantastic, and that fantasy itself constitutes such rupture. My treatment of fantasy in literature is carried out on the basis of theoretical considerations by various authorities in the area-Tzvetan Todorov, Rosemary Jackson, R. C. Schlobin, Brian Attebery, Kathryn Hume, W. R. Irwin, C. N. Manlove, Lance Olsen, Eric Rabkin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Darko Suvin and others. Epistemic, ontological and phenomenological issues of reality are also presented in relation to philosophical and cultural theories by Plato, Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Sigmund Freud, Brian Massumi, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett, Benjamin Woolley and Timothy Leary. It is also my attempt by the end of the dissertation to liberate the concept of fantasy from restrictive and somewhat traditional fictional assumptions, and situate it into an immediate and contemporary context characterised by the hyperreal (the merging of fantasy and reality) and the virtual. My 'Introduction' proposes a resurgence of fantasy in film, fiction and scholarship, in which fantasy is not merely seen as a reaction to mimetic-dominated narratives but can also be considered in terms of shifting conceptualisations of the 'real' in an age obsessed with reality alteration and fabrication. The emergence and development of fantasy in literature is explored in Chapter 2. Multiform in aspect, fantasy is found to antedate realistic narratives in both representation and re-presentation. In Plato's Republic, the mimetic power of art is condemned; Plato however does not hesitate to use the fantastic premise of the Allegory of the Cave (a flexible motif also running throughout this dissertation) to differentiate actual reality from similar reality. On the other hand, Aristotle outlines the first poetics of mimesis as a decidedly more 'legitimate' art form since it is more probable. In light of this debate, I therefore attempt to account for the various historical/ideological shifts in perception regarding various writers' efforts to depict the 'real'. A noticeable shift from realism to fantasy occurs in later years, when Modernism and Postmodernism start questioning reality and its apprehension.