Fantasy
Bent Sørensen, Jørgen Riber Christensen, Lene Yding,
Torben B.
Poulsen, Steen Christiansen, Gunhild Agger a.o.
Team taught lecture sequence - Fall 2006
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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)