Thursday Today I will be delivering the following talk as part of Sewanee’s Lifelong Learning series, delivered in a venue that used to be my high school and where I spoke 50 years ago. It may sound strange to some of you that a literary scholar such as myself would talk about fantasy. Aren’t we […]
Tag Archives: fantasy
Fantasy and the Problem of Violence
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Beowulf, Beowulf poet, Carl Jung, J. R. R. Tolkien, Joseph Campbell, Lord of the Rings, Sigmund Freud, violence Comments closed
Fantasy Frees Us from Narrow Thinking
Friday I share today a new insight that I gained from my recent Lifelong Learning class about “Wizards and Enchantresses.” To set it up, I first share my theory of fantasy. As I see it, fantasy is always oppositional in its invocation of magic and the supernatural. If it flourished in the wake of the […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Enlightenment, Fundamentalism, Geoffrey Chaucer, scientism, Wife of Bath Comments closed
Fantasy Keeps Dreams Alive
Thursday In Monday’s and Tuesday’s posts (see here and here), I laid out the outlines of my first “Wizards and Enchantresses” class, which I’m currently teaching as part of Sewanee’s Lifelong Learning Program. The first class I devoted to Merlin, the second will focus on Morgan Le Fay, the third will take up Shakespeare’s Prospero, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arthurian tales, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Idylls of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Mark Twain, Merlin, Once and Future King, Sword in the Stone, T. H. White Comments closed
The Uses of Fantasy
Monday This coming week I will be teaching a four-session lifelong learning course at Sewanee entitled “Literary Wizards and Enchantresses, from Merlin and Morgan Le Fay to Gandalf and Galadriel.” I’m using today’s blog post to sort out my ideas for the first class, which will focus on Merlin and his successors. Before turning to […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Arthurian tales, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings Comments closed
Pinocchio, a Horror Story
Disney’s “Pinocchio” sugarcoats the original, which is the stuff of nightmares. Happy Halloween.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Bruno Bettelheim, Carlo Collodi, Halloween, morality tales, Pinocchio, Uses of Enchantment Comments closed
Reading My Way to Adulthood
As an adolescent, I used fantasy in an attempt to hold on to my childhood innocence and hated “Catcher in the Rye.” Little did I realize that Salinger’s novel describes my struggle.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Circus Animals Desertion", adolescence, Albert Camus, Catcher in the Rye, Coming of Age, existentialism. Jean Paul Sartre, J. D. Salinger, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Ring, W. B. Yeats Comments closed
Fantasy, a Portal to the Numinous
People are often drawn to fantasy in our post-Enlightenment world because they hunger for the numinous.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Crystal Forest", alienation, angels, Beauty and the Beast, Charles Taylor, disenchantment, Enlightenment, Georg Lukacs, Harmut Rosa, His Dark Materials, Homer, John Milton, Odyssey, Paradise Lost, Philip Pullman, re-enchantment, resonance, Theory of the Novel, Willam Sharp Comments closed
