Fantasy

Bent Sørensen, Jørgen Riber Christensen, Lene Yding, Torben B. Poulsen, Steen Christiansen, Gunhild Agger a.o.
Team taught lecture sequence - Fall 2006
Transfer to home page maintained by Jørgen Riber

Bent Sørensen's lectures:

Postmodern 'high' fantasy: the case of Ursula K. LeGuin/Postmodern 'low' fantasy: the case of Samuel R. Delany

The two authors raise basic questions concerning postmodern concepts of identity: LeGuin reinvents a well-known archetypal fantasy-structure in her Earthsea-novels and various short stories, dealing with naming and 'magic' in connection with an Adamic 'true language' which gives power over objects and humans. In her version naming and unnaming is a continuous proces in our mode of narrating the world and thereby giving our lives a telos. There are thus. affinities between her and Paul Auster's conception of language.
Delany, on the other hand, who competed with LeGuin for winning the most Nebulas and other s-f- and fantasy awards throughout the 1960s and 70s, is the only author I know of to have published a  deconstructive utopian fantasy-novel on transsexuality, featuring an appendix on Derrida, and simultaneously writing and publishing a version of the Faust-tale as a pornographic novel featuring a blonde heroine named Kirsten. High and low are thus mixed in interesting, if not distinctly queer ways in his practice of the fantastic... We shall look at sequences from his Neveryon saga as well as portions of his theory fictions "Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus".

Texts:

Ursula LeGuin: "The Word of Unbinding" (1964) & "The Rule of Names" (1964), both from her collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975)

Samuel R Delany: "The Tale of Gorgik" & "Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three", both from Tales of Neverÿon (1979)