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Rhetorics of Fantasy
Transcending arguments over the definition of fantasy literature, Rhetorics of Fantasy introduces a provocative new system of classification for the genre. Utilizing nearly two hundred examples of modern fantasy, author Farah Mendlesohn uses this system to explore how fiction writers construct their fantastic worlds. Mendlesohn posits four categories of fantasy--portal-quest, immersive, intrusion, and liminal--that arise out of the relationship of the protagonist to the fantasy world. Using these sets, Mendlesohn argues that the author's stylistic decisions are then shaped by the inescapably political demands of the category in which they choose to write. Each chapter covers at least twenty books in detail, ranging from nineteenth-century fantasy and horror to extensive coverage of some of the best books in the contemporary field. Offering a wide-ranging discussion and penetrating comparative analysis, Rhetorics of Fantasy will excite fans and provide a wealth of material for scholarly and classroom discussion.
Includes discussion of works by over 100 authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Mieville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams
Includes discussion of works by over 100 authors, including Lloyd Alexander, Peter Beagle, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Crowley, Stephen R. Donaldson, Stephen King, C. S. Lewis, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, China Mieville, Suniti Namjoshi, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Sheri S. Tepper, J. R. R. Tolkien, Tad Williams
336 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2008
52 people are currently reading
1182 people want to read
About the author
Farah Mendlesohn
34 books168 followersFarah Mendlesohn is a Hugo Award-winning British academic and writer on science fiction. In 2005 she won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which she edited with Edward James.
Mendlesohn is Professor of Literary History at Anglia Ruskin University, where she is also Head of English and Media. She writes on Science Fiction, Fantasy, Children's Literature and Historical Fiction. She received her D.Phil. in History from the University of York in 1997.
Her book Rhetorics of Fantasy won the BSFA award for best non-fiction book in 2009; the book was also nominated for both Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.
In 2010 she was twice nominated for Hugo Awards in the Best Related Books category.
She was the editor of Foundation - The International Review of Science Fiction from 2002 to 2007. She formerly was Reviews Editor of Quaker Studies.
Mendlesohn is Professor of Literary History at Anglia Ruskin University, where she is also Head of English and Media. She writes on Science Fiction, Fantasy, Children's Literature and Historical Fiction. She received her D.Phil. in History from the University of York in 1997.
Her book Rhetorics of Fantasy won the BSFA award for best non-fiction book in 2009; the book was also nominated for both Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.
In 2010 she was twice nominated for Hugo Awards in the Best Related Books category.
She was the editor of Foundation - The International Review of Science Fiction from 2002 to 2007. She formerly was Reviews Editor of Quaker Studies.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
November 29, 2011
I was extraordinarily disappointed with this book. Mendlesohn's earlier treatment of Diana Wynne Jones, in which she employs her categories, was groundbreaking and illuminating. It also fully convinced me that her taxonomy was correct, at least as an interpretive suprastructure. Unfortunately, Rhetorics of Fantasy falls far short of her previous book.
There are several problems with the book, the biggest being that the central taxonomical project is inherently flawed (and yes, I read the "health note"), but it is also plagued by bad writing and bad argumentation marked by sloppy thinking.
The central problem is that Mendlesohn is trying to make an argument for rhetorical technique derived from her classification system. However this system, as she herself admits (see the "Health Note"), is an arbitrary one that is impossible to apply to the vast majority of fantasy books due to their adeptness at swimming between the boundaries. As she admits throughout, Mendlesohn had trouble deciding how to categorize even the books she examines within each chapter, sometimes moving them to a different chapter, or mentioning that a book would easily fit into another category, then bracketing any discussion of this fact. In each chapter she has to argue that the other categories could indeed be present within the current category she is treating.
Ironically, this entire problem could have been avoided had she approached the problem from the other direction. Rather than seeing fantasy as inherently divided into categories which are then reified by rhetoric (doubly ironically, a position I don't think Mendlesohn actually holds), she should have argued that specific rhetorical strategies create fantasies that can be categorized across her taxonomy. Rather than creating a taxonomy of fantasy, she needed to create a taxonomy of rhetoric. The benefit of this is would have been that that she could group rhetorical strategies together, rather than texts together. This would obviate the need to continually point out that one text can be seen as occupying multiple categories at once. Instead, one author employs rhetoric in multiple ways within one text, weaving, for example, immersive and intrusive rhetorics together to create a polyvalent whole.
This is further compounded by the fact that the categorizations that she does make are not themselves argued for. In every chapter she selects books that she considers representative of the type of fantasy she is investigating. However, she makes no attempt to explain or justify any of her choices, no matter how controversial or off the wall they seem. This is especially problematic when she includes books which would not widely be considered fantasy, or which in fact aren't fantasy at all (Pilgrim's Progress), without making more than token efforts to justify these inclusions. These range from books whose inclusion seems bizarre but acceptable (Holes) to books whose inclusion literally flies in the face of the critical tradition (Pilgrim's Progress or the short story "The Pit and the Pendulum").
There are two essential problems with this. One more pretentious issue is that it raises questions about her own engagement with the broader world of literary criticism (there are serious problems with her treatment of the Gothic, the dream vision/allegory tradition, etc.). Is Mendlesohn trying to engage with critics while still writing an accessible book about fantasy? If she is she did not do her homework, so to speak.
The other problem is that there is so much slippage between genres, traditions, etc. that what Mendlesohn defines as fantasy or within the fantastic tradition is totally called into question. She spends close to twenty pages on Gothic literature, much of it on the less fantastic edges of the gothic, only to declare Fairy Tale part of Fancy and therefore not relevant. She of course moves on without explaining this bizarre decision, leaving a gaping hole in her discussion of Intrusion Fantasy. But this is to be expected, and is only more indicative of her sloppy writing and arguing.
I was also really bothered by Mendlesohn's poor argumentation throughout the book. She constantly makes pronouncements which she does not or cannot defend, introduces important points without thinking through their implications for her broader argument, and even makes points that are so facile they offend the reader. At the same time, because she is so flippant with the points she makes, she packs so much into each chapter that it is impossible to follow the major argumentative thread. This turns all of her chapters into loosely organized musings that sometimes feel like a slog.
Just to follow two related points along these lines: One of Mendlesohn's observations about Portal/Quest fantasy is that the category is given to imperialist readings. In her work on Diana Wynne Jones this was a brilliant insight, and lead her to a brilliant critique of Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm and me to a breakthrough in understanding the paradoxically great yet racist Damar books by Robin McKinley. In Rhetorics, however, Mendlesohn does not work out this insight. Instead, early on, she asserts that "This kind of Fantasy is essentially imperialist," and then goes on to analyze most of the books in the Portal-Quest chapter without even the slightest nod to her insight. This becomes extremely distressing when we reach the core of her chapter, where she analyzes The Lord of the Rings a book widely considered by critics to be strongly and notably anti-imperialist. Yet The Lord of the Rings, she informs us, created the framework of the Portal-Quest as we now know it. It "codified much of how the quest fantasy deals with landscape, with character, with the isolation of the protagonists into the club-story narrative and with reader positioning." She does nothing to either argue against other critics who see LotR as anti-imperialist, or to explain how the book is in fact anti-imperialist in contradiction to her previous assertion. In fact, the latter discussion would have supported her overall argument and her overall treatment of LotR as a portal-quest fantasy, so it is distressing to me that she didn't follow that path. It is one of many that she ignores.
The other point, Mendlesohn asserts in her Intrusive fantasy chapter that those seduced by the fantastic (even to their deaths) are in fact like rapists, trotting out "the old rape justification of "it made me do it! It seduced me! It was asking for it!" She quotes Nalo Hopkinson (who originated that quote) as support for her assertions, and then continues to return to Hopkinson everytime she makes this argument. Unfortunately, I think she and Hopkinson are deeply mis-appropriating narratives of rape to make this point, at a level that feels almost dangerous to me. Viewed in either direction, they are essentially victim blaming. In Mythago Wood, the book she relies on most to make this point, those (men) seduced by the fantastic are indeed seduced and ultimately killed by the wood. If we carry on the violence against women analogy, they are more like battered women, seduced by an abuser. If we keep strictly with the rape analogy, then she is calling the men who are legitimately seduced by the wood rapists. In other words, the rapist's excuse is true, and the object of rape was in fact a seductress. This is not a path that should be tread down with anything other than a great deal of clarifying and supporting argumentation, but Mendlesohn delivers none, a serious failing and highly indicative of her sloppy, surface level argumentation throughout.
I will skip a critique of her writing in general, suffice it to say that she is verbose where concision would be better and that her paragraphs are poorly structured. There were also dozens of grammatical and proofreading errors, to the point that I was noticing one every other page. I normally would not point out the one or two understandable grammar errors in a book, however these were so commonplace, and really so unacceptable in an academic work, that they seem almost indicative of the carelessness that went into the book.
All of this said, I still suggest that serious readers of fantasy literature read this book, especially those interested in the critical perspective. It is frustrating, but Mendlesohn's observations about fantasy, albeit obfuscated by her incompetence here, are truly groundbreaking.
There are several problems with the book, the biggest being that the central taxonomical project is inherently flawed (and yes, I read the "health note"), but it is also plagued by bad writing and bad argumentation marked by sloppy thinking.
The central problem is that Mendlesohn is trying to make an argument for rhetorical technique derived from her classification system. However this system, as she herself admits (see the "Health Note"), is an arbitrary one that is impossible to apply to the vast majority of fantasy books due to their adeptness at swimming between the boundaries. As she admits throughout, Mendlesohn had trouble deciding how to categorize even the books she examines within each chapter, sometimes moving them to a different chapter, or mentioning that a book would easily fit into another category, then bracketing any discussion of this fact. In each chapter she has to argue that the other categories could indeed be present within the current category she is treating.
Ironically, this entire problem could have been avoided had she approached the problem from the other direction. Rather than seeing fantasy as inherently divided into categories which are then reified by rhetoric (doubly ironically, a position I don't think Mendlesohn actually holds), she should have argued that specific rhetorical strategies create fantasies that can be categorized across her taxonomy. Rather than creating a taxonomy of fantasy, she needed to create a taxonomy of rhetoric. The benefit of this is would have been that that she could group rhetorical strategies together, rather than texts together. This would obviate the need to continually point out that one text can be seen as occupying multiple categories at once. Instead, one author employs rhetoric in multiple ways within one text, weaving, for example, immersive and intrusive rhetorics together to create a polyvalent whole.
This is further compounded by the fact that the categorizations that she does make are not themselves argued for. In every chapter she selects books that she considers representative of the type of fantasy she is investigating. However, she makes no attempt to explain or justify any of her choices, no matter how controversial or off the wall they seem. This is especially problematic when she includes books which would not widely be considered fantasy, or which in fact aren't fantasy at all (Pilgrim's Progress), without making more than token efforts to justify these inclusions. These range from books whose inclusion seems bizarre but acceptable (Holes) to books whose inclusion literally flies in the face of the critical tradition (Pilgrim's Progress or the short story "The Pit and the Pendulum").
There are two essential problems with this. One more pretentious issue is that it raises questions about her own engagement with the broader world of literary criticism (there are serious problems with her treatment of the Gothic, the dream vision/allegory tradition, etc.). Is Mendlesohn trying to engage with critics while still writing an accessible book about fantasy? If she is she did not do her homework, so to speak.
The other problem is that there is so much slippage between genres, traditions, etc. that what Mendlesohn defines as fantasy or within the fantastic tradition is totally called into question. She spends close to twenty pages on Gothic literature, much of it on the less fantastic edges of the gothic, only to declare Fairy Tale part of Fancy and therefore not relevant. She of course moves on without explaining this bizarre decision, leaving a gaping hole in her discussion of Intrusion Fantasy. But this is to be expected, and is only more indicative of her sloppy writing and arguing.
I was also really bothered by Mendlesohn's poor argumentation throughout the book. She constantly makes pronouncements which she does not or cannot defend, introduces important points without thinking through their implications for her broader argument, and even makes points that are so facile they offend the reader. At the same time, because she is so flippant with the points she makes, she packs so much into each chapter that it is impossible to follow the major argumentative thread. This turns all of her chapters into loosely organized musings that sometimes feel like a slog.
Just to follow two related points along these lines: One of Mendlesohn's observations about Portal/Quest fantasy is that the category is given to imperialist readings. In her work on Diana Wynne Jones this was a brilliant insight, and lead her to a brilliant critique of Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm and me to a breakthrough in understanding the paradoxically great yet racist Damar books by Robin McKinley. In Rhetorics, however, Mendlesohn does not work out this insight. Instead, early on, she asserts that "This kind of Fantasy is essentially imperialist," and then goes on to analyze most of the books in the Portal-Quest chapter without even the slightest nod to her insight. This becomes extremely distressing when we reach the core of her chapter, where she analyzes The Lord of the Rings a book widely considered by critics to be strongly and notably anti-imperialist. Yet The Lord of the Rings, she informs us, created the framework of the Portal-Quest as we now know it. It "codified much of how the quest fantasy deals with landscape, with character, with the isolation of the protagonists into the club-story narrative and with reader positioning." She does nothing to either argue against other critics who see LotR as anti-imperialist, or to explain how the book is in fact anti-imperialist in contradiction to her previous assertion. In fact, the latter discussion would have supported her overall argument and her overall treatment of LotR as a portal-quest fantasy, so it is distressing to me that she didn't follow that path. It is one of many that she ignores.
The other point, Mendlesohn asserts in her Intrusive fantasy chapter that those seduced by the fantastic (even to their deaths) are in fact like rapists, trotting out "the old rape justification of "it made me do it! It seduced me! It was asking for it!" She quotes Nalo Hopkinson (who originated that quote) as support for her assertions, and then continues to return to Hopkinson everytime she makes this argument. Unfortunately, I think she and Hopkinson are deeply mis-appropriating narratives of rape to make this point, at a level that feels almost dangerous to me. Viewed in either direction, they are essentially victim blaming. In Mythago Wood, the book she relies on most to make this point, those (men) seduced by the fantastic are indeed seduced and ultimately killed by the wood. If we carry on the violence against women analogy, they are more like battered women, seduced by an abuser. If we keep strictly with the rape analogy, then she is calling the men who are legitimately seduced by the wood rapists. In other words, the rapist's excuse is true, and the object of rape was in fact a seductress. This is not a path that should be tread down with anything other than a great deal of clarifying and supporting argumentation, but Mendlesohn delivers none, a serious failing and highly indicative of her sloppy, surface level argumentation throughout.
I will skip a critique of her writing in general, suffice it to say that she is verbose where concision would be better and that her paragraphs are poorly structured. There were also dozens of grammatical and proofreading errors, to the point that I was noticing one every other page. I normally would not point out the one or two understandable grammar errors in a book, however these were so commonplace, and really so unacceptable in an academic work, that they seem almost indicative of the carelessness that went into the book.
All of this said, I still suggest that serious readers of fantasy literature read this book, especially those interested in the critical perspective. It is frustrating, but Mendlesohn's observations about fantasy, albeit obfuscated by her incompetence here, are truly groundbreaking.
April 15, 2022
Very poorly written and unfocused.
Mendlesohn mentions 4 types of fantasy (portal-quest, immersive, intrusive, and liminal), which are not comprehensive (according to her), and "liminal" being fairly uncommon (according to her) (this was very puzzling: why include "liminal" if the 4 categories are not comprehensive anyway? The first three would have been enough...)
It's not clear what angle these 4 categories refer to, i.e., how can we tell if a book is in category 1, 2, 3, or 4? Mendlesohn only gives examples of fictional works in each of these categories, but does not point to any specific aspect of the book that made it definitively fall into which categor(ies), e.g., from a narrative or discourse standpoint.
This is because Mendlesohn constantly changes the scope of her discussion. She quickly changes the topic, e.g., plot and character elements (which in itself was confusing, as I found myself asking whether it was a summary, or they were key essentials to the fantasy category?), stylistics, interpretative "analysis", etc. It was not clear which of these aspects contributed to the book being classified within the aforementioned categories, especially with regards as to how her personal commentary on the book was relevant to the fantasy category being discussed.
Mendlesohn also doesn't provide sufficient information on the book she's talking about, which makes it hard to follow her thoughts. Even when I did have familiarity with a work, I still couldn't be sure what she meant.
Her coverage of the various works was also uneven, sometimes being excruciatingly detailed on unimportant points, and too little detail on an assertion that could have been interesting to know more about.
Did not finish at about 50%.
Mendlesohn mentions 4 types of fantasy (portal-quest, immersive, intrusive, and liminal), which are not comprehensive (according to her), and "liminal" being fairly uncommon (according to her) (this was very puzzling: why include "liminal" if the 4 categories are not comprehensive anyway? The first three would have been enough...)
It's not clear what angle these 4 categories refer to, i.e., how can we tell if a book is in category 1, 2, 3, or 4? Mendlesohn only gives examples of fictional works in each of these categories, but does not point to any specific aspect of the book that made it definitively fall into which categor(ies), e.g., from a narrative or discourse standpoint.
This is because Mendlesohn constantly changes the scope of her discussion. She quickly changes the topic, e.g., plot and character elements (which in itself was confusing, as I found myself asking whether it was a summary, or they were key essentials to the fantasy category?), stylistics, interpretative "analysis", etc. It was not clear which of these aspects contributed to the book being classified within the aforementioned categories, especially with regards as to how her personal commentary on the book was relevant to the fantasy category being discussed.
Mendlesohn also doesn't provide sufficient information on the book she's talking about, which makes it hard to follow her thoughts. Even when I did have familiarity with a work, I still couldn't be sure what she meant.
Her coverage of the various works was also uneven, sometimes being excruciatingly detailed on unimportant points, and too little detail on an assertion that could have been interesting to know more about.
Did not finish at about 50%.
January 17, 2014
I liked it, but like this reviewer, I think Mendlesohn has got the cart before the horse. Attempt to classify fantasy novels is like herding cats. They are slippery creatures, leaping and diving through taxonomy at will. Categorizing the different narrative techniques and discussing how different novels make use of (a mix of) these techniques would have, to me, made more sense.
Her argument isn't helped by a lack of clarity in her writing. The chapter on the portal fantasy is easily the best. In other sections at times Mendlesohn relies more heavily on a synopsis of the books she discusses than on a clear articulation of her classification structure.
Glad I read it, though: some interesting points to think about and Mendlesohn shows a great understanding of, and love for, the genre.
Her argument isn't helped by a lack of clarity in her writing. The chapter on the portal fantasy is easily the best. In other sections at times Mendlesohn relies more heavily on a synopsis of the books she discusses than on a clear articulation of her classification structure.
Glad I read it, though: some interesting points to think about and Mendlesohn shows a great understanding of, and love for, the genre.
November 10, 2024
Farah Mendlesohn you are so smart and so interesting to read and I am begging you to stop using passive voice. Every. Sentence. In. This. Book. Is. So. Passive. Once I noticed I couldn't stop noticing and it messed with me the whole way.
I always vibe with Mendlesohn's criticism because she inserts her own opinions into her analysis so much and never pretends otherwise. So many lines in this read like "this could be due to X technique, or it could just be because Y author is much better than Z author." Slay, queen. Put your authorial presence in that theory.
Seriously, though, this is a very useful book for thinking about fantasy. I think a lot of subsequent theorists have done what Mendlesohn actively tells them not to do, which is to use her framework as a strict classification system, but this text doesn't itself fall into that issue. Mendlesohn lays out features of fantasy in a very clear voice. I found myself recognizing her points the way you recognize common sense ideas only once someone else points them out to you. I think her system makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate that she left so much space for outliers/crossovers/unclassifiable texts. I also really appreciate how she tracks changes in her own thinking throughout the writing process - I feel that I can learn from this book as a piece of writing just as much as a piece of theory.
I always vibe with Mendlesohn's criticism because she inserts her own opinions into her analysis so much and never pretends otherwise. So many lines in this read like "this could be due to X technique, or it could just be because Y author is much better than Z author." Slay, queen. Put your authorial presence in that theory.
Seriously, though, this is a very useful book for thinking about fantasy. I think a lot of subsequent theorists have done what Mendlesohn actively tells them not to do, which is to use her framework as a strict classification system, but this text doesn't itself fall into that issue. Mendlesohn lays out features of fantasy in a very clear voice. I found myself recognizing her points the way you recognize common sense ideas only once someone else points them out to you. I think her system makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate that she left so much space for outliers/crossovers/unclassifiable texts. I also really appreciate how she tracks changes in her own thinking throughout the writing process - I feel that I can learn from this book as a piece of writing just as much as a piece of theory.
October 31, 2008
Ms. Mendlesohn's book is based on a question: What happens if we consider fantasy from the way the fantastic enters the text? From this question, and a plethora of reading, she formulates an answer based on several other questions: What is the structure of types of fantasy? Where is the reader positioned? How do we meet the fantastic? How does this affect the choice of language? ect. She makes it very clear that it's not the answer, but rather what she sees from what she has studied in the genre. It's not supposed to be a template on how to write a certain kind of fantasy.
But it does bring up good points to think about when writing fantasy.
Fantasy, she says, can be broken into four categories:
Portal/Quest fantasies
Immersive fantasies
Intrusion fantasies
Liminal fantasies
She also points out a few novels that fall outside of these categories (as is to be expected, since genre is not rubric, it's dialectic).
Portal/Quest fantasies are really two similar types of fantasy that end up following the same rhetorical structures. The Portal fantasy is one where the protagonist is transported out of their "real" world into a "magical" one. The most obvious example of this is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Quest fantasies are similar in that the protagonist leaves the known world (which is often far removed from magic, even if there is magic in the world) and travels into the unknown on, well, a quest. The most obvious example of this is The Lord of the Rings (despite it's immersive qualities).
The reader is positioned as a companion/audience and we're tied to the protagonist for our understanding and decoding of the world. We accept the narrative of the protagonist. What he/she learns (from others) in traveling is the truth. The rhetoric is one of denying what should be taken for granted. It positions the reader and the protagonist as naive (which makes some sense, given the preponderance of children/naive, unlearned people who end up becoming the heroes of these kinds of tales). The tales often deal with the thinning of the land and end with the restoration of the land, the return to the grandeur of old. There is also, many times, there is an association with the King and the well-being of the Land (very Arthurian). Portal/quest fantasies are closed narratives. The information we learned is not questioned. History is fixed. When Gandalf speaks of elder times, we know it to be true.
While the world of a portal/quest novel can be immersive, it is not the world, but the journey that matters, and what of the world we see, we see as a tourist on that journey, not as a native of the land. In LoTR, Frodo is only ever native to the Shire at the beginning of the novel. There we are not tourists, but rather immersed in Frodo's everyday life. Once we pass beyond the boundries of the Shire, we, like Frodo, are in unfamiliar territory. We, like Frodo (or the children in LWW), are astonished at it, wonder and marvel at the sights (or quiver).
In contrast, the Immersive fantasy assumes the reader is as much a part of the world as the protagonist. The world must be complete and fully formed. We must share the assumptions of the world just as we would if we were reading about another period in history or place in our own, very real, world. We sit in the heads of the protagonist and interpret the world based on what they do and do not notice (i.e., we are not told, the world is described).
There is no astonishment when it comes to the fantastic... it is taken for granted by the protagonist, and therefore must also be by the reader. Immersive fantasies are not so much about restoration as they are about entropy, watching the world decline. It not about building back up. The protagonist is engaged in a struggle with the world, must challenge what is known. History is not always reliable. Mendlesohn points to Perdido Street Station as an immersive fantasy... which brings up an interesting point. Some immersive fantasies are nearly indistinguishable from science fiction.
Another immersive fantasy would be the Silmarilian. It's a good contrast to use between the immersive qualities of LoTR and the true immersion of the reader in the world. Much of what we learn in the Silmarillion is through characters fully living in their world, rather than through the eyes of a character who is on a journey through it. Immersive fantasies tend to take place (though not always) in cities. I would personally say that many of the Urban fantasies are immersive.
Intrusion fantasies are fantasies where the fantastic intrudes on the "real" word. In an intrusion fantasy, the world is ruptured by the intrusion. It disrupts normality and must either be sent back to whence it came, or negotiated and normalized. But the normalization is not restoration. The world or the protagonist is fundamentally changed by the intrusion.
An interesting rhetorical device of the intrusion fantasy is that the protagonist relies on senses over over what is known. There's an inherent distrust built up around what is known and in inherent trust in the senses. What is felt is true. What is known is circumspect. The protagonist moves from denial of the fantastic to the acceptance, during which there is a kind of push/pull between what is known and what is sensed with the senses winning out into what is true. There are times when the senses are couched in pseudo-scientific terms, but still end up as feelings clothed in faux-analysis. (See also Lovecraft.)
Quite often the intruder renders the fantasy world more real than the mundane world of the character. The protagonist is sliced from the world, but also does not view themselves as entirely part of their world (or of the common man). It moves between latency and expectation, building until the end. Quite often the ending is somewhat of a let-down... it is the tension of the impending intrusion, the fantastic breathing on the back of the protagonists neck, that often is the heart of the tale. Intrusion fantasy is about entropy and the resistance to entropy.
I'm going to stop here and state that I'm not sure I fully understand the next category, the liminal Fantasy. Mendlesohn originally conceived it as a form of fantasy that estranges the reader from the fantastic as it is seen and described by the protagonist. In the end, I think she comes to define liminal fantasy as fantasy which presents two worlds, two "truths" but which denies choosing between them. They are written in such a way that the mundane is described as fantastic (using the descriptive and baroque language fantasy readers are used to) and the fantastic is rendered more mundane or real, but no indication is given as to which is really "real." It is a form that plays on the expectation of the fantasy reader. It depends on the knowingness of the reader, the tendency to suspend disbelief and the knowledge the reader has about how these kinds of stories usually play out. Then it turns it on its head and the reader is left wondering just where the fantasy is, and just which of the truths presented is true. They deny the reader coded interpretation. They are not closed stories and much, at the end, is left open for the reader to decide.
Mendlesohn then talks about some of the texts that don't neatly fit into her taxonomy, usually by shifting seamlessly between her different types of fantasy. I found this section the hardest to follow, and I think it requires a better understanding of the text she sights in the chapter.
This is a dense book. Part of that density comes from the detail the author provides about the novels she read. Many of them are summarized in detail and excerpted heavily. There were times when I started to skim the retelling of the books Mendlesohn referred to, simply because I wanted to read about what she concluded from her, not get a summary of a novel. It was useful to know about the details of the novels, to a point, but there were times when I felt like the point was being dragged over and over again.
In the end, it was a useful read, and an interesting one.
But it does bring up good points to think about when writing fantasy.
Fantasy, she says, can be broken into four categories:
Portal/Quest fantasies
Immersive fantasies
Intrusion fantasies
Liminal fantasies
She also points out a few novels that fall outside of these categories (as is to be expected, since genre is not rubric, it's dialectic).
Portal/Quest fantasies are really two similar types of fantasy that end up following the same rhetorical structures. The Portal fantasy is one where the protagonist is transported out of their "real" world into a "magical" one. The most obvious example of this is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Quest fantasies are similar in that the protagonist leaves the known world (which is often far removed from magic, even if there is magic in the world) and travels into the unknown on, well, a quest. The most obvious example of this is The Lord of the Rings (despite it's immersive qualities).
The reader is positioned as a companion/audience and we're tied to the protagonist for our understanding and decoding of the world. We accept the narrative of the protagonist. What he/she learns (from others) in traveling is the truth. The rhetoric is one of denying what should be taken for granted. It positions the reader and the protagonist as naive (which makes some sense, given the preponderance of children/naive, unlearned people who end up becoming the heroes of these kinds of tales). The tales often deal with the thinning of the land and end with the restoration of the land, the return to the grandeur of old. There is also, many times, there is an association with the King and the well-being of the Land (very Arthurian). Portal/quest fantasies are closed narratives. The information we learned is not questioned. History is fixed. When Gandalf speaks of elder times, we know it to be true.
While the world of a portal/quest novel can be immersive, it is not the world, but the journey that matters, and what of the world we see, we see as a tourist on that journey, not as a native of the land. In LoTR, Frodo is only ever native to the Shire at the beginning of the novel. There we are not tourists, but rather immersed in Frodo's everyday life. Once we pass beyond the boundries of the Shire, we, like Frodo, are in unfamiliar territory. We, like Frodo (or the children in LWW), are astonished at it, wonder and marvel at the sights (or quiver).
In contrast, the Immersive fantasy assumes the reader is as much a part of the world as the protagonist. The world must be complete and fully formed. We must share the assumptions of the world just as we would if we were reading about another period in history or place in our own, very real, world. We sit in the heads of the protagonist and interpret the world based on what they do and do not notice (i.e., we are not told, the world is described).
There is no astonishment when it comes to the fantastic... it is taken for granted by the protagonist, and therefore must also be by the reader. Immersive fantasies are not so much about restoration as they are about entropy, watching the world decline. It not about building back up. The protagonist is engaged in a struggle with the world, must challenge what is known. History is not always reliable. Mendlesohn points to Perdido Street Station as an immersive fantasy... which brings up an interesting point. Some immersive fantasies are nearly indistinguishable from science fiction.
Another immersive fantasy would be the Silmarilian. It's a good contrast to use between the immersive qualities of LoTR and the true immersion of the reader in the world. Much of what we learn in the Silmarillion is through characters fully living in their world, rather than through the eyes of a character who is on a journey through it. Immersive fantasies tend to take place (though not always) in cities. I would personally say that many of the Urban fantasies are immersive.
Intrusion fantasies are fantasies where the fantastic intrudes on the "real" word. In an intrusion fantasy, the world is ruptured by the intrusion. It disrupts normality and must either be sent back to whence it came, or negotiated and normalized. But the normalization is not restoration. The world or the protagonist is fundamentally changed by the intrusion.
An interesting rhetorical device of the intrusion fantasy is that the protagonist relies on senses over over what is known. There's an inherent distrust built up around what is known and in inherent trust in the senses. What is felt is true. What is known is circumspect. The protagonist moves from denial of the fantastic to the acceptance, during which there is a kind of push/pull between what is known and what is sensed with the senses winning out into what is true. There are times when the senses are couched in pseudo-scientific terms, but still end up as feelings clothed in faux-analysis. (See also Lovecraft.)
Quite often the intruder renders the fantasy world more real than the mundane world of the character. The protagonist is sliced from the world, but also does not view themselves as entirely part of their world (or of the common man). It moves between latency and expectation, building until the end. Quite often the ending is somewhat of a let-down... it is the tension of the impending intrusion, the fantastic breathing on the back of the protagonists neck, that often is the heart of the tale. Intrusion fantasy is about entropy and the resistance to entropy.
I'm going to stop here and state that I'm not sure I fully understand the next category, the liminal Fantasy. Mendlesohn originally conceived it as a form of fantasy that estranges the reader from the fantastic as it is seen and described by the protagonist. In the end, I think she comes to define liminal fantasy as fantasy which presents two worlds, two "truths" but which denies choosing between them. They are written in such a way that the mundane is described as fantastic (using the descriptive and baroque language fantasy readers are used to) and the fantastic is rendered more mundane or real, but no indication is given as to which is really "real." It is a form that plays on the expectation of the fantasy reader. It depends on the knowingness of the reader, the tendency to suspend disbelief and the knowledge the reader has about how these kinds of stories usually play out. Then it turns it on its head and the reader is left wondering just where the fantasy is, and just which of the truths presented is true. They deny the reader coded interpretation. They are not closed stories and much, at the end, is left open for the reader to decide.
Mendlesohn then talks about some of the texts that don't neatly fit into her taxonomy, usually by shifting seamlessly between her different types of fantasy. I found this section the hardest to follow, and I think it requires a better understanding of the text she sights in the chapter.
This is a dense book. Part of that density comes from the detail the author provides about the novels she read. Many of them are summarized in detail and excerpted heavily. There were times when I started to skim the retelling of the books Mendlesohn referred to, simply because I wanted to read about what she concluded from her, not get a summary of a novel. It was useful to know about the details of the novels, to a point, but there were times when I felt like the point was being dragged over and over again.
In the end, it was a useful read, and an interesting one.
September 5, 2018
I went from uninterested in this (because I don’t really care about narratology) to cautiously optimistic (after reading some stuff published after it that referenced it favorably) to just disappointed. for starters, Mendlesohn clearly hates “portal-quest” fantasy, and while she says in the intro that she took steps to mitigate her personal biases...it didn’t work, lol, and it leads her to the conclusion that the form as a whole is inherently ideologically or epistemologically...bad? evil? immoral? I don’t know, something stronger than “bad” but weaker than “evil”. she also seemed to pretty much just be bored with intrusion fantasies, and as a result the chapter on them was boring, too.
but mostly the whole book just suffers from being, well, kind of boring. the methodological notes in the introduction notwithstanding, this is mostly taxonomic, and so I feel kind of cheated — I got neither a useful formalism nor, really, the kind of careful attention to the particular language of fantasy that Samuel Delany gave us for science fiction. instead, as other reviewers have noted, the book is mostly a flood of examples without enough argument to pull them together. that the back cover notes that each chapter discusses “at least twenty books in detail” points to its rushedness rather than its actual comprehensiveness.
but mostly the whole book just suffers from being, well, kind of boring. the methodological notes in the introduction notwithstanding, this is mostly taxonomic, and so I feel kind of cheated — I got neither a useful formalism nor, really, the kind of careful attention to the particular language of fantasy that Samuel Delany gave us for science fiction. instead, as other reviewers have noted, the book is mostly a flood of examples without enough argument to pull them together. that the back cover notes that each chapter discusses “at least twenty books in detail” points to its rushedness rather than its actual comprehensiveness.
January 8, 2018
I can finally say I have read this book in its entirety.
The missing star is due to my personal disagreement with some of her placements and the obvious issues such an enormous endeavour would stir up.
Overall, Mendlesohn takes home the gold when she defines exceptions to her own taxonomy which, to me, made her argument much more reasonable.
The missing star is due to my personal disagreement with some of her placements and the obvious issues such an enormous endeavour would stir up.
Overall, Mendlesohn takes home the gold when she defines exceptions to her own taxonomy which, to me, made her argument much more reasonable.
October 19, 2022
early in the introduction they make this argument—actually, i'll quote the whole thing so you can see what i'm talking about.
Fish's point is that theories about literature are trapped in an egocentric predicament. they're not falsifiable because everything can be made to conform with them. this skeptical position is uncomfortable if you want to interpret literature in a theoretical way. so Mendlesohn starts off by saying that they don't like it. nach. i don't like it either. so how do they solve the problem Fish is posing? by saying that they "[do] not necessarily beleive in" the theory they're proposing and that they work "to the degree that they remain arguable"—then they puff up the fifth chapter about books that don't fit their schema. basically, they take an anti-realist stance on their own theory (and all valid theories—ones that are 'worth a damn'), says they have no claim on reality, disclaim personal belief in them, and asks them to be valid only when the data fits. okay? but that's not a solution to Fish's riddle. they just restate the predicament and say 'and that's okay!'
i don't like that. the reason i don't like that is that it lets them sidestep both the thorny theoretical issue of verifiability while also handwaving any and all empirical information that the theory could interact with. and managing to do it in a condemnatory tone directed at the people actually working on the problem. it's kind of galling. anyway, it's a problem with this book—because the theory is self-consciously arbitrary we skip over any and all questions of methodology. the most discussion we get is the statement that "[t]his book is the result of an extended thought experiment", "an exercise in almost pure Reason". cool. what was the thought experiment, by the way...? uuh...? the primary method appears to be "cherry picking" and, occasionally, lunch with M. John Harrison.
there are a couple of citations which hint at where Mendlesohn's concept of "rhetorics" come from. Wayne C. Booth's the Rhetoric of Fiction and A Rhetoric of Irony are both in the bibliography, but they're only cited in a brief discussion about the interactivity between reader and text (in the introduction) and after that only when discussing irony. and Chapter 2 starts with a citation of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, pg. 245, which introduces 'ornamental speech' and 'persuasive speech' as two components of rhetoric. this is briefly discussed on the first page of Chapter 2 (to support an excellent observaion that in Immersive Fantasy 'ornamental speech and persuasive speech become inseparable') but then it doesn't come up again. further, Mendlesohn uses those terms ('ornamental speech' and 'persuasive speech') without operationalizing them. they don't even define them: i had to go read page 245 myself. similarly they frequently refer to "the quadripartite template" of "wrongness, thinning, recognition, and healing/return" attributed to John Clute, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, pg. 338–339, but never define it. this means the reader has to go find the book themselves if they want to know what the hell Mendlesohn is talking about, but that's not even really the problem. the bigger problem is that we're left in the dark about Mendlesohn's theory. the book is supposed to be about the rhetorical strategies that writers use to construct the fantastic, but there isn't a clear theory for how that's accomplished. the book seems to spend most of its time off-topic, and we end up blurring the lines between rhetorical device, plot, genre, and book. Ellie's review suggests that taxonomic problems—where books are classified and reclassified across several categories—could be solved by restricting claffication to rhetorical strategies rather than trying to classify entire books, but i don't know if this solution is on offer for the reason that the book is unable to clearly identify rhetorical strategies in the first place.
when the book is on topic it can be really good. i appreciated the discussion in Chapter 1 about how things are made to appear fantastic to the reader of the Portal-Quest Fantasy by presenting the fantasty elements as something unfamiliar to the viewpoint character and therefore requiring explanation. since the character crosses a threshold into an unfamilliar world they have to learn about unfamilliar things for the first time, which gives the writer an opportunity to explain them. therefore the Portal-Quest gets to include lovingly written ekphraseis of fantastical landscapes, long quasi-historical lore, symbolically dense prophetic dreams, and so forth. this is contrasted with the Immersive Fantasy which refrains from calling attention to the fantastic, instead asking us to "decode [the fantastic] from the cues and sensibilities of the protagonist" and thus "negates the sense of wonder in favor of an atmosphere of ennui." this is a clever observation that i'm definitely going to be thinking about while i write in the future, but, confusingly, with respect to the Portal Quest, it's presented as an artistic failure.
a failure of what order? "This kind of fantasy is essentially imperialist." huh? the criticism here is that Portal Quest explanations of the fantastic must be presented as true and authoritative. "In making the past 'storyable,' the rhetorical demands of the portal-quest fantasy deny the notion of 'history as argument' which is pervasive among modern historians." the proof of this is that the guides and seers provide lore in a manner which is "uninterruptible, unquestionable, and delivered absolutely in the mode of the club discourse"—'club discourse' is referring to the "club narrative, a cozy discourse that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century". the club narrative is a story with a frame story about storytelling; everyone gathers around the campfire and tells stories. you're familiar with the idea. while it's a very old concept—"The Canterbury Tales is a club story" writes Mendlesohn—it still 'emerged' somehow from Victorian England and embodied "an assertion of a particular type of Victorian masculinity". then there's a discussion of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as an example, and that's all the substantiation we get for the claim that the Portal-Quest Fantasy is imperialist.
it's quite frankly a bewildering claim. it seems to proceed by means of a play on words. the storyteller who provides exposition in the Portal-Quest Fantasy is speaking authoriatively, so the Portal-Quest Fantasy is authoritarian. and because he is a telling a story, it is immediately and uncomplicatedly 'club discourse', which "is diegetic, a denial of discourse", with a "single-voiced and impervious authority", and is therefore reactionary. this concept is allowed to creep until anything that is uncomplicatedly true is imperialistic club discourse and China Mieville gets some points deducted for using diegesis in the Scar, where he writes the following description:
according to Mendlesohn this passage is a result of the fact that in this chapter, because certain focalizing characters are missing, "Miéville has no choice but to simply describe, to pause the action while the characters are outlined." afterwards Richard P. Brown gets a raking for expositing some character's backstory:
alongside an example from G. P. Taylor:
Mendlesohn's verdict: "The list of information—much of it irrelevant and with no impact on the actual novel—processes like a social worker’s report across the pages. It is of course a classic example of telling, rather than showing, and as such could simply be dismissed as poor style" except that, according to Mendlesohn, it breaks the immersion in the Immersive Fantasy its supposed to be because it "break[s] the consensus reality" and "position[s] the readers as ignorant as they might be in a quest fantasy."
it's bizarre—it's bizarre to express this amount of suspicion of diegesis in narrative. if you go and read any book about the real world you will find diegetic exposition like that. go and open Flaubert's Madame Bovary. on the very first page:
this isn't 'club discourse.' it's also implicitly factual and neutral information which we assume accurately describes the world. yet it does not, by these means, construe the reader as ignorant, uninformed, passive and amazed. it doesn't make the details of the Bovary family appear fantastic. Mendlesohn is therefore not capable of accurately identifying when a text's rhetoric is actually construing the fantastic at all, nevermind how. as written, this theory just doesn't work. it persuades only when paired with the cherry-picked examples Mendlesohn provides (and even then they trip over themselves trying to distinguish authentic examples from 'subversions').
by the way, the club narrative is a very surprising genealogy for the storytelling in the Portal-Quest. especially considering both Lewis and Tolkein, who Mendlesohn credits with formalizing the genre, were both medievalists. specifically, medievalists who wrote scholarly treatments of medieval literature. this technique is very typical of medieval Germanic literature. the Poetic Edda is full of mythological expositions in the guise of dialogues and prophetic visions, while the Prose Edda unfolds through densely connected storytelling frame stories. crossing a threshold and meeting an otherworld guide is a constant feature of Welsh material collected in the Mabinogion, and is also represented in Dante's Divine Comedy (Virgil—the original Tourguide from the Underworld!). aside from briefly acknowledging the frame story of the Canterbury tales and a passing mention of the Grail Quest in Arthurian legend, Mendlesohn ignores the medieval background. it's a surprising omission considering both its explicit connection to the authors, as we mentioned, but also its immense influence on Victorian Romantic literature, especially the Norse material, through the earliest widely available English translations and adaptations (see Larrington, 'Translating the Poetic Edda' pg. 22). instead Mendlesohn constructs a genealogy with surprising sources, like the Pilgrim's Progress and Heart of Darkness. this matters—if the storytelling is because the genre was "shaped" in some unconscious way by culturally Christian attitudes and the "imperialistic" club narrative then it's vulnerable to Mendlesohn's hermeneutics of suspicion and the ideological critique can do its magic. but if, instead, it's informed by Tolkein & Lewis's medievalism, then when "portal-quest fantasies reconstruct history in the mode of the Scholastics" it isn't a pre-critical cultural reflex but an act of critical speculation on the literate representation of history in history. and this seems extremely reasonable to me. the fictional history of a work of fantasy is not any more obliged to share the epistemic premises of the real discipline of history than its dragons are obliged to share the physiology of real lizards.
phew! that was harsh, huh? sorry, Fanny. no hard feelings!
[N]o theory that claims universal applicability is worth a damn. Here I take serious exception with Stanley Fish’s argument that “theories always work and they will always produce exactly the results they predict, results that will be immediately compelling to those for whom the theory’s assumptions and enabling principles are self-evident. Indeed, the trick would be to find a theory that didn’t work” (68). This statement, however amusing, encapsulates much of what is wrong with current “schools” of literary criticism. This observation may seem egregious, but it is essential when reading this book to know that its author does not necessarily believe in these structures. They are observations, not diktats, and they are powerful only to the degree that they remain arguable.
Fish's point is that theories about literature are trapped in an egocentric predicament. they're not falsifiable because everything can be made to conform with them. this skeptical position is uncomfortable if you want to interpret literature in a theoretical way. so Mendlesohn starts off by saying that they don't like it. nach. i don't like it either. so how do they solve the problem Fish is posing? by saying that they "[do] not necessarily beleive in" the theory they're proposing and that they work "to the degree that they remain arguable"—then they puff up the fifth chapter about books that don't fit their schema. basically, they take an anti-realist stance on their own theory (and all valid theories—ones that are 'worth a damn'), says they have no claim on reality, disclaim personal belief in them, and asks them to be valid only when the data fits. okay? but that's not a solution to Fish's riddle. they just restate the predicament and say 'and that's okay!'
i don't like that. the reason i don't like that is that it lets them sidestep both the thorny theoretical issue of verifiability while also handwaving any and all empirical information that the theory could interact with. and managing to do it in a condemnatory tone directed at the people actually working on the problem. it's kind of galling. anyway, it's a problem with this book—because the theory is self-consciously arbitrary we skip over any and all questions of methodology. the most discussion we get is the statement that "[t]his book is the result of an extended thought experiment", "an exercise in almost pure Reason". cool. what was the thought experiment, by the way...? uuh...? the primary method appears to be "cherry picking" and, occasionally, lunch with M. John Harrison.
there are a couple of citations which hint at where Mendlesohn's concept of "rhetorics" come from. Wayne C. Booth's the Rhetoric of Fiction and A Rhetoric of Irony are both in the bibliography, but they're only cited in a brief discussion about the interactivity between reader and text (in the introduction) and after that only when discussing irony. and Chapter 2 starts with a citation of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, pg. 245, which introduces 'ornamental speech' and 'persuasive speech' as two components of rhetoric. this is briefly discussed on the first page of Chapter 2 (to support an excellent observaion that in Immersive Fantasy 'ornamental speech and persuasive speech become inseparable') but then it doesn't come up again. further, Mendlesohn uses those terms ('ornamental speech' and 'persuasive speech') without operationalizing them. they don't even define them: i had to go read page 245 myself. similarly they frequently refer to "the quadripartite template" of "wrongness, thinning, recognition, and healing/return" attributed to John Clute, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, pg. 338–339, but never define it. this means the reader has to go find the book themselves if they want to know what the hell Mendlesohn is talking about, but that's not even really the problem. the bigger problem is that we're left in the dark about Mendlesohn's theory. the book is supposed to be about the rhetorical strategies that writers use to construct the fantastic, but there isn't a clear theory for how that's accomplished. the book seems to spend most of its time off-topic, and we end up blurring the lines between rhetorical device, plot, genre, and book. Ellie's review suggests that taxonomic problems—where books are classified and reclassified across several categories—could be solved by restricting claffication to rhetorical strategies rather than trying to classify entire books, but i don't know if this solution is on offer for the reason that the book is unable to clearly identify rhetorical strategies in the first place.
when the book is on topic it can be really good. i appreciated the discussion in Chapter 1 about how things are made to appear fantastic to the reader of the Portal-Quest Fantasy by presenting the fantasty elements as something unfamiliar to the viewpoint character and therefore requiring explanation. since the character crosses a threshold into an unfamilliar world they have to learn about unfamilliar things for the first time, which gives the writer an opportunity to explain them. therefore the Portal-Quest gets to include lovingly written ekphraseis of fantastical landscapes, long quasi-historical lore, symbolically dense prophetic dreams, and so forth. this is contrasted with the Immersive Fantasy which refrains from calling attention to the fantastic, instead asking us to "decode [the fantastic] from the cues and sensibilities of the protagonist" and thus "negates the sense of wonder in favor of an atmosphere of ennui." this is a clever observation that i'm definitely going to be thinking about while i write in the future, but, confusingly, with respect to the Portal Quest, it's presented as an artistic failure.
a failure of what order? "This kind of fantasy is essentially imperialist." huh? the criticism here is that Portal Quest explanations of the fantastic must be presented as true and authoritative. "In making the past 'storyable,' the rhetorical demands of the portal-quest fantasy deny the notion of 'history as argument' which is pervasive among modern historians." the proof of this is that the guides and seers provide lore in a manner which is "uninterruptible, unquestionable, and delivered absolutely in the mode of the club discourse"—'club discourse' is referring to the "club narrative, a cozy discourse that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century". the club narrative is a story with a frame story about storytelling; everyone gathers around the campfire and tells stories. you're familiar with the idea. while it's a very old concept—"The Canterbury Tales is a club story" writes Mendlesohn—it still 'emerged' somehow from Victorian England and embodied "an assertion of a particular type of Victorian masculinity". then there's a discussion of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as an example, and that's all the substantiation we get for the claim that the Portal-Quest Fantasy is imperialist.
it's quite frankly a bewildering claim. it seems to proceed by means of a play on words. the storyteller who provides exposition in the Portal-Quest Fantasy is speaking authoriatively, so the Portal-Quest Fantasy is authoritarian. and because he is a telling a story, it is immediately and uncomplicatedly 'club discourse', which "is diegetic, a denial of discourse", with a "single-voiced and impervious authority", and is therefore reactionary. this concept is allowed to creep until anything that is uncomplicatedly true is imperialistic club discourse and China Mieville gets some points deducted for using diegesis in the Scar, where he writes the following description:
Below the waist, the crays’ armoured hindquarters were those of colossal rock lobsters: huge carapaces of gnarled shell and overlapping somites. Their human abdomens jutted out from above where the eyes and antennae would have been.
according to Mendlesohn this passage is a result of the fact that in this chapter, because certain focalizing characters are missing, "Miéville has no choice but to simply describe, to pause the action while the characters are outlined." afterwards Richard P. Brown gets a raking for expositing some character's backstory:
“When she was a small child, Cassie had discovered that she could heal little creatures that seemed sick”, while “Keiron had a gift too—not such a powerful one, but inexplicable nevertheless. From an early age he had learned that he could ‘speak’ to things in his head, they all had a voice in his head and would answer his questions if they had a mind to.”
alongside an example from G. P. Taylor:
“Thomas Barrick was thirteen years old. He had lived all his life in Thorpe and had never been any further than Whitby. His father had been lost at sea in a great storm when Thomas was seven years old”. His friend Kate, “always said that she feared nothing. She didn’t believe in ghosts, creatures of the night, or God himself. Her father had beaten all the belief from her. To her father she had to be the nearest thing to a son. The son who had died two years before she was born.”
Mendlesohn's verdict: "The list of information—much of it irrelevant and with no impact on the actual novel—processes like a social worker’s report across the pages. It is of course a classic example of telling, rather than showing, and as such could simply be dismissed as poor style" except that, according to Mendlesohn, it breaks the immersion in the Immersive Fantasy its supposed to be because it "break[s] the consensus reality" and "position[s] the readers as ignorant as they might be in a quest fantasy."
it's bizarre—it's bizarre to express this amount of suspicion of diegesis in narrative. if you go and read any book about the real world you will find diegetic exposition like that. go and open Flaubert's Madame Bovary. on the very first page:
His father, Monsieur Charles Denis Bartolome Bovary, retired assistant-surgeon-major, compromised about 1812 in certain conscription scandals, and forced at this time to leave the service, had taken advantage of his fine figure to get hold of a dowry of sixty thousand francs that offered in the person of a hosier’s daughter who had fallen in love with his good looks. A fine man, a great talker, making his spurs ring as he walked, wearing whiskers that ran into his moustache, his fingers always garnished with rings and dressed in loud colours, he had the dash of a military man with the easy go of a commercial traveller.
Once married, he lived for three or four years on his wife’s fortune, dining well, rising late, smoking long porcelain pipes, not coming in at night till after the theatre, and haunting cafes. The father-in-law died, leaving little; he was indignant at this, “went in for the business,” lost some money in it, then retired to the country, where he thought he would make money.
But, as he knew no more about farming than calico, as he rode his horses instead of sending them to plough, drank his cider in bottle instead of selling it in cask, ate the finest poultry in his farmyard, and greased his hunting-boots with the fat of his pigs, he was not long in finding out that he would do better to give up all speculation.
this isn't 'club discourse.' it's also implicitly factual and neutral information which we assume accurately describes the world. yet it does not, by these means, construe the reader as ignorant, uninformed, passive and amazed. it doesn't make the details of the Bovary family appear fantastic. Mendlesohn is therefore not capable of accurately identifying when a text's rhetoric is actually construing the fantastic at all, nevermind how. as written, this theory just doesn't work. it persuades only when paired with the cherry-picked examples Mendlesohn provides (and even then they trip over themselves trying to distinguish authentic examples from 'subversions').
by the way, the club narrative is a very surprising genealogy for the storytelling in the Portal-Quest. especially considering both Lewis and Tolkein, who Mendlesohn credits with formalizing the genre, were both medievalists. specifically, medievalists who wrote scholarly treatments of medieval literature. this technique is very typical of medieval Germanic literature. the Poetic Edda is full of mythological expositions in the guise of dialogues and prophetic visions, while the Prose Edda unfolds through densely connected storytelling frame stories. crossing a threshold and meeting an otherworld guide is a constant feature of Welsh material collected in the Mabinogion, and is also represented in Dante's Divine Comedy (Virgil—the original Tourguide from the Underworld!). aside from briefly acknowledging the frame story of the Canterbury tales and a passing mention of the Grail Quest in Arthurian legend, Mendlesohn ignores the medieval background. it's a surprising omission considering both its explicit connection to the authors, as we mentioned, but also its immense influence on Victorian Romantic literature, especially the Norse material, through the earliest widely available English translations and adaptations (see Larrington, 'Translating the Poetic Edda' pg. 22). instead Mendlesohn constructs a genealogy with surprising sources, like the Pilgrim's Progress and Heart of Darkness. this matters—if the storytelling is because the genre was "shaped" in some unconscious way by culturally Christian attitudes and the "imperialistic" club narrative then it's vulnerable to Mendlesohn's hermeneutics of suspicion and the ideological critique can do its magic. but if, instead, it's informed by Tolkein & Lewis's medievalism, then when "portal-quest fantasies reconstruct history in the mode of the Scholastics" it isn't a pre-critical cultural reflex but an act of critical speculation on the literate representation of history in history. and this seems extremely reasonable to me. the fictional history of a work of fantasy is not any more obliged to share the epistemic premises of the real discipline of history than its dragons are obliged to share the physiology of real lizards.
phew! that was harsh, huh? sorry, Fanny. no hard feelings!
August 26, 2015
Ukupan utisak je... eh. Teza koja se ocrtava na početku, predložena taksonomija fantastike - to je odlično, i podela po tipovima portalne, intruzivne, imerzivne i liminalne fantastike - sve je to kul i neverovatno korisno za neku generalnu analizu fentezija.
Međutim, kad se krene sa obrazlaganjem, knjiga prilično potone. Zamerke mogu da se grupišu otprilike ovako:
- "retorika" se analizira u znatno manjem delu knjige, najviše pažnje se poklanja strukturi zapleta i evt. poziciji naratora.
- utoliko je malo nezgodno što se autorka odmah na početku ograđuje od analize dela nastalih van engleskog govornog područja uz obrazloženje "da se bavi prevashodno jezikom" a onda komotno nastavlja sa analiziranjem motiva i strukture.
- Svako, ali svako skretanje od fentezija u užem smislu vodi u vrlo klimave analize: to posebno važi za gotski roman kao predstavnika fantastike intruzije (gde se jedan od malobrojnih pokušaja da se zaista analizira retorika i stil nekog teksta (Otrantskog zamka) pokvari insistiranjem da je *evo ovo* stil karakterističan za fantastiku intruzije/horor, a radi se o tipičnoj retorici sentimentalnog romana XVIII veka kakvu koriste i Ričardson i Goldsmit).
- kad se pomene magični realizam, u srećom kratkom osvrtu, kao njegovi predstavnici analiziraju se jedna (1) Borhesova priča, Sto godina samoće iiii... Kuća čudnih duša. :( To je definitivno najslabiji deo cele studije, i bolje da je sasvim izostavljen jer je prosto bolno koliko maši poentu.
Pa zašto onda četiri zvezdice?
Zato što je knjiga *u stvari*, tamo gde se bavi svojim poslom (a to je sistematizacija savremenog fentezija i izvlačenje nekih osnovnih zajedničkih karakteristika za njegove tipove), zaista dobra i kvalitetna i sa mnogo zanimljivih uvida, samo su, nažalost, isprekidani pominjanim digresijama i opterećeni potpunim ignorisanjem drugih vidova fantastike ili nedajbože drugih književnosti. (Da, istinski opšti pristup sa analizama ovih razmera bi skrcao i najambiciozniju kičmu, ne, nije bilo neizvodljivo lepo nazvati knjigu "taksonomija anglofonog fentezija" i mirna Bačka.)
Međutim, kad se krene sa obrazlaganjem, knjiga prilično potone. Zamerke mogu da se grupišu otprilike ovako:
- "retorika" se analizira u znatno manjem delu knjige, najviše pažnje se poklanja strukturi zapleta i evt. poziciji naratora.
- utoliko je malo nezgodno što se autorka odmah na početku ograđuje od analize dela nastalih van engleskog govornog područja uz obrazloženje "da se bavi prevashodno jezikom" a onda komotno nastavlja sa analiziranjem motiva i strukture.
- Svako, ali svako skretanje od fentezija u užem smislu vodi u vrlo klimave analize: to posebno važi za gotski roman kao predstavnika fantastike intruzije (gde se jedan od malobrojnih pokušaja da se zaista analizira retorika i stil nekog teksta (Otrantskog zamka) pokvari insistiranjem da je *evo ovo* stil karakterističan za fantastiku intruzije/horor, a radi se o tipičnoj retorici sentimentalnog romana XVIII veka kakvu koriste i Ričardson i Goldsmit).
- kad se pomene magični realizam, u srećom kratkom osvrtu, kao njegovi predstavnici analiziraju se jedna (1) Borhesova priča, Sto godina samoće iiii... Kuća čudnih duša. :( To je definitivno najslabiji deo cele studije, i bolje da je sasvim izostavljen jer je prosto bolno koliko maši poentu.
Pa zašto onda četiri zvezdice?
Zato što je knjiga *u stvari*, tamo gde se bavi svojim poslom (a to je sistematizacija savremenog fentezija i izvlačenje nekih osnovnih zajedničkih karakteristika za njegove tipove), zaista dobra i kvalitetna i sa mnogo zanimljivih uvida, samo su, nažalost, isprekidani pominjanim digresijama i opterećeni potpunim ignorisanjem drugih vidova fantastike ili nedajbože drugih književnosti. (Da, istinski opšti pristup sa analizama ovih razmera bi skrcao i najambiciozniju kičmu, ne, nije bilo neizvodljivo lepo nazvati knjigu "taksonomija anglofonog fentezija" i mirna Bačka.)
June 30, 2019
This quite a rigorous but thorough analysis of a large number of fantasy books. Mendlesohn proposes a 4 part taxonomy of fantasy (portal/quest, immersive, intrusive and liminal) and then draws on examples to illustrate this. She also sets out to offer some ideas about what would constitute effective writing for each type.
I found the book most accessible where Mendlesohn draws on examples I already knew. It is not an easy read (I made lots of use of the built in kindle dictionary). However, it did certainly get me thinking about how these categories might be applied to other books I have read.
I found the book most accessible where Mendlesohn draws on examples I already knew. It is not an easy read (I made lots of use of the built in kindle dictionary). However, it did certainly get me thinking about how these categories might be applied to other books I have read.
January 1, 2025
This is the book every other fantasy-related article cites? I don't understand. It's... so bad, so extremely subjective, the categories are so random even the author can't persuasively define and defend them. (it could be titled Why I Hate Portal Fantasy So Much and Three Other Random Categories). The examples will tell you nothing unless you have read the books because the author is incapable to explain the plot relevant to the point she wants to make.
Read
August 15, 2022File this one under "I was only supposed to read a chapter for class but I got carried away and read most of it"
January 28, 2024
thesis reading🤓
i found the chapter on portal/quest fantasy insightful enough since it’s the most relevant for my project, the other categories outlined less so for reasons others already have explained in their reviews. the categories also ultimately seem quite arbitrary, not sure if i’m smart enough to claim it’s due to the writing and argumentation but for someone at my academic level at least i didn’t feel like the book offered as much insight into the language, narrative & structure of fantasy as i was hoping it would. idk i’m no expert though
i found the chapter on portal/quest fantasy insightful enough since it’s the most relevant for my project, the other categories outlined less so for reasons others already have explained in their reviews. the categories also ultimately seem quite arbitrary, not sure if i’m smart enough to claim it’s due to the writing and argumentation but for someone at my academic level at least i didn’t feel like the book offered as much insight into the language, narrative & structure of fantasy as i was hoping it would. idk i’m no expert though
May 21, 2019
Det er en virkelig god analyse, men den bliver lidt ødelagt for mig når hun inkluderer en disclaimer i begyndelsen: this book is not intended to create rules and its categories are not intended to fix anything in stone. Hvad var pointen med bogen så?
Read
October 23, 2023Oon aina vähän baffled näitten jälkeen ja sit mun esseen kirjottaminen alkaa vaa sillee isolla kasalla kysymyksiä
April 27, 2012
Decidedly mixed. I like Mendlesohn's proposed taxonomic schema (with one, rather significant, caveat, below), and her own rhetorics, often couched in provisional statements rather than authoritative pronouncements, combined with her liberal citations of personal conversations and emails with fantasy authors, conjures up the atmosphere of a cozy if one-sided seminar.
The chapter on the Portal-Quest Fantasy is probably the strongest, and was a good choice to lead with, as it is recognizably a Thing with a familiar sequence and set of themes that play out in many books that you will have read. The Immersion Fantasy (where the fantastic is known to and accepted by the characters) and the Intrusion Fantasy (where the characters must come to terms with the fantastic in what they previously considered to be the ordinary universe) are also useful categories, although the chapter on the Intrusion Fantasy takes a hard left turn into horror and barely considers what i would consider to be works of fantasy at all.
I find Mendlesohn's fourth category, the Liminal Fantasy, completely incoherent and useless. Having read her definition ("that form of fantasy which estranges the reader from the fantastic as seen and described by the protagonist") and her examples, which are primarily a single short story by Joan Aiken ("Yes, But Today Is Tuesday") but also include Lud-in-the-Mist, Wizard of the Pigeons, Tiger's Railway, Little, Big, Holes, Lost Boy Lost Girl, and The Separation, I am further from knowing what she means by this category than ever, except that these are all books that I either have zero desire to read or books that, having read, I barely recognized as they were discussed here. Frankly, if I were to travel back in time, I would advise myself to skip this chapter altogether, along with the final chapter on books that cut across her proposed taxonomy, since they all seem to involve a crossover with the Liminal Fantasy.
Still, I find the first three categories useful! One star for each of them!
The chapter on the Portal-Quest Fantasy is probably the strongest, and was a good choice to lead with, as it is recognizably a Thing with a familiar sequence and set of themes that play out in many books that you will have read. The Immersion Fantasy (where the fantastic is known to and accepted by the characters) and the Intrusion Fantasy (where the characters must come to terms with the fantastic in what they previously considered to be the ordinary universe) are also useful categories, although the chapter on the Intrusion Fantasy takes a hard left turn into horror and barely considers what i would consider to be works of fantasy at all.
I find Mendlesohn's fourth category, the Liminal Fantasy, completely incoherent and useless. Having read her definition ("that form of fantasy which estranges the reader from the fantastic as seen and described by the protagonist") and her examples, which are primarily a single short story by Joan Aiken ("Yes, But Today Is Tuesday") but also include Lud-in-the-Mist, Wizard of the Pigeons, Tiger's Railway, Little, Big, Holes, Lost Boy Lost Girl, and The Separation, I am further from knowing what she means by this category than ever, except that these are all books that I either have zero desire to read or books that, having read, I barely recognized as they were discussed here. Frankly, if I were to travel back in time, I would advise myself to skip this chapter altogether, along with the final chapter on books that cut across her proposed taxonomy, since they all seem to involve a crossover with the Liminal Fantasy.
Still, I find the first three categories useful! One star for each of them!
May 26, 2015
Mendlesohn's book is an exploration of those corridors of fantasy literature effectively left out of the narrative by both Todorov and Jackson, deemed to be properly understood as the marvelous by the former, and not of sufficient subversion by the latter, while engaging with the gothic fiction that fascinates both of them. In doing so, she sets out four fuzzy genres sets, drawing on, critically engaging with, and expanding on the work of Attebury and Clute, while engaging a huge swath of literature and criticism. I have some minor quibbles of her representation of a couple books, but for the most part, her readings of the texts and her categories are worthwhile. The engagement with the first three categories, Portal, Immersive, and Intrusion fantasies was the most interesting, although her reading of the first category seemed to be the 'bad' fantasy category, despite her desire to avoid such a category. I found myself wanting to both engage in the texts she discusses, and to engage with her categories, as well. Well worth the read.
June 13, 2018
Interesting viewpoint, ultimately disappointing. Mendlesohn’s goal is to categorize works of fantasy fiction using rhetorical analysis. Ostensibly not interested in creating a taxonomy of genres and subgenres based on formal analysis, she nevertheless ends up suggesting hierachies and boxes.
A big oversight - that of many scholars interested in SFF, in my experience - is taking the exceptionality of fantastic fiction as given, and drawing from a limited pool of previous theory, mostly other SFF-related work. A lot of what is presented as qualities of fantasy literature is just as well found in realist literature, and theorized on by earlier scholars. A broader POV might have yielded better results.
There are some inspired readings of individual works, but there’s not much theoretical heft to this book. On a metalevel, though, a good example of SFF being the ”most typical literature in the world” in that it reveals the structures and potential of any kind of literature, and is thus fruitful and attractive material for any theorist.
A big oversight - that of many scholars interested in SFF, in my experience - is taking the exceptionality of fantastic fiction as given, and drawing from a limited pool of previous theory, mostly other SFF-related work. A lot of what is presented as qualities of fantasy literature is just as well found in realist literature, and theorized on by earlier scholars. A broader POV might have yielded better results.
There are some inspired readings of individual works, but there’s not much theoretical heft to this book. On a metalevel, though, a good example of SFF being the ”most typical literature in the world” in that it reveals the structures and potential of any kind of literature, and is thus fruitful and attractive material for any theorist.
August 26, 2010
This is a very (possibly over-) wordy book trying to turn art (writing fantasy lit) into a science. After the first chapter, I pretty much skimmed. This is a great book for budding authors/writers who are interested in the genre and want to know more about it. It could have been called "a taxonomy of fantasy" rather than "rhetorics," but it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that this book is very dry but does have information/answers/questions about the fantasy genre, as well as examples of some of the best fantasy novels and series out there (C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Frank Baum, etc.) It can be helpful, and I enjoyed and was informed by the read. Still, I doubt the everyday Joe will find this interesting in the slightest, and it takes a patient reader to study it to the end.
December 11, 2013
Two stars for obvious biases, terms that get thrown around casually but never defined, and a somewhat random selection of stories. Four stars for a fascinating concept, the number of new fantasy books it inspired me to check out, and the fact that there is just not enough scholarship on fantasy out there. I enjoyed reading this book, even when I was baffled by the unexplained terms or annoyed by some of the blanket-assumptions it made.
October 11, 2022
Poor Analysis. So many speculative arguments. So little solid results. The author apparently have read many fantasy works, but her book is a waste of my time. I'm not here for your thesis proposal, am I?
March 18, 2018
On the whole, I thought this would be more illuminating than it was.
May 11, 2017
I must begin by admitting a not-very-deep acquaintance, and somewhat deeper admiration for, Farah Mendlesohn, by way of the Intartoobz.
The thesis of this - I guess you'd call it a monograph? - is that fantasy can be usefully (if not monosemically) characterized by the way the fantastic enters the text; or, alternatively, the way the fantastic is introduced to the (hypothetical/ideal) reader. Using this rubric, Mendlesohn identifies four major groups of fantasies:
1) The portal-quest fantasy. This is the story where a protagonist is taken from her familiar surroundings and put into the fantasy world. A good type case for this is C.S. Lewis's _Chronicles of Narnia_, where children from our world are constantly traversing to Narnia to take part in adventures. But the case is made that Tolkien's _Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ also qualify, in that the hobbits are taken from their comfortable/familiar lives in the Shire and placed in the Big World Outside.
2) The immersive fantasy. A type case here might be Tolkien's _Silmarillion_; a story set in a fantasy world with no meaningful connection to ours. (Arguments that _The Silmarillion_ is set in "our past" will be cheerfully ignored.) Other good examples are Alexander's _Chronicles of Prydain_ and most of Pratchett's Discworld novels.
3) The intrusive fantasy. A story in which something from "outside" enters the "normal" world. A type case here is Hodgson's _The House on the Borderlands_. Charles Williams's novels are largely of this nature, as is most fantastic horror. Some Discworld novels, such as _Lords and Ladies_ and _Moving Pictures_, fit here also, as the received world of the Disc is invaded by forces from "outside."
4) The liminal fantasy. This is the hardest to define; it is, strictly speaking, a story on the borderlines of the fantastic. It's hard to set a type case for such a category, but Lindholm's _Wizard of the Pigeons_ fits. Williams's _All Hallows' Eve_ seems to fit pretty well here, as does Christopher Priest's _The Separation_; but also Peake's _Gormenghast_ books.
There is a fifth grouping, of fantastic stories that don't fit comfortably into any of these categories. If there is a type case for this, it might be Roderick Townley's _The Great Good Thing_ (which I shall have to find and read). Some of them combine strategies of multiple types; others don't even fit that comfortably.
The thing is, that "thesis" isn't really what the book is _about_. What it's really about is the rhetorical (textual) strategies fantasists use in creating these stories, ranging from point of view to various forms of irony and equipose, and everything in between. Mendlesohn illustrates her points with (occasionally lengthy) excerpts from a variety of texts.
I began with an admission; I will end with another. Following Mendlesohn's arguments takes effort, and occasionally reached the edges of my qualification to read such things. But I got a great deal of pleasure from following them, and will return to some of these texts - and approach new ones - with a new set of tools for understanding what the writer is doing.
The thesis of this - I guess you'd call it a monograph? - is that fantasy can be usefully (if not monosemically) characterized by the way the fantastic enters the text; or, alternatively, the way the fantastic is introduced to the (hypothetical/ideal) reader. Using this rubric, Mendlesohn identifies four major groups of fantasies:
1) The portal-quest fantasy. This is the story where a protagonist is taken from her familiar surroundings and put into the fantasy world. A good type case for this is C.S. Lewis's _Chronicles of Narnia_, where children from our world are constantly traversing to Narnia to take part in adventures. But the case is made that Tolkien's _Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_ also qualify, in that the hobbits are taken from their comfortable/familiar lives in the Shire and placed in the Big World Outside.
2) The immersive fantasy. A type case here might be Tolkien's _Silmarillion_; a story set in a fantasy world with no meaningful connection to ours. (Arguments that _The Silmarillion_ is set in "our past" will be cheerfully ignored.) Other good examples are Alexander's _Chronicles of Prydain_ and most of Pratchett's Discworld novels.
3) The intrusive fantasy. A story in which something from "outside" enters the "normal" world. A type case here is Hodgson's _The House on the Borderlands_. Charles Williams's novels are largely of this nature, as is most fantastic horror. Some Discworld novels, such as _Lords and Ladies_ and _Moving Pictures_, fit here also, as the received world of the Disc is invaded by forces from "outside."
4) The liminal fantasy. This is the hardest to define; it is, strictly speaking, a story on the borderlines of the fantastic. It's hard to set a type case for such a category, but Lindholm's _Wizard of the Pigeons_ fits. Williams's _All Hallows' Eve_ seems to fit pretty well here, as does Christopher Priest's _The Separation_; but also Peake's _Gormenghast_ books.
There is a fifth grouping, of fantastic stories that don't fit comfortably into any of these categories. If there is a type case for this, it might be Roderick Townley's _The Great Good Thing_ (which I shall have to find and read). Some of them combine strategies of multiple types; others don't even fit that comfortably.
The thing is, that "thesis" isn't really what the book is _about_. What it's really about is the rhetorical (textual) strategies fantasists use in creating these stories, ranging from point of view to various forms of irony and equipose, and everything in between. Mendlesohn illustrates her points with (occasionally lengthy) excerpts from a variety of texts.
I began with an admission; I will end with another. Following Mendlesohn's arguments takes effort, and occasionally reached the edges of my qualification to read such things. But I got a great deal of pleasure from following them, and will return to some of these texts - and approach new ones - with a new set of tools for understanding what the writer is doing.
Want to read
October 27, 2019The review to read is by my friend Michael Swanwick, who liked it a lot:
http://michaelswanwick.com/nonfic/rhe...
"So I'm sitting in a bar with a chemist named Jane and a guy who says his name is Tom Nobody, though naturally I have my doubts. Jane is delicately picking the cashews out of the bowl of mixed nuts and eating them one at a time. Tom's positioned himself so he can keep one eye on the door. And I'm talking about how Kevin Maroney hit me up to write this essay.
"I told him I couldn't possibly review Rhetorics of Fantasy," I say. "My mind just doesn't work that way. That's not what I'm for. I don't even read critical works properly — I dive in and out of them at random. If I get bored, I skim. I don't take notes, and I skip most of the footnotes. My reading is disorganized and scattershot."
"So what did Maroney say?" Jane asks.
"He told me to make a virtue out of it. He said I should write something impressionistic. Something scattershot and episodic." . . .
. . .
the dark ambiguities of liminal fantasy as illuminated by the fire sermon
"For those of us previously aware of Farah Mendlesohn's criticism — and who else would spend $27.95 for the Wesleyan University Press trade paperback? — the greatest interest lies in the section on liminal fantasy, a form which she herself defined, and which therefore possesses all the sexiness of the new. Until the form is commonly understood and internalized by the rest of us, there is no way to argue with Mendlesohn's conclusions. . . .
"Slightly over four pages are dedicated to discussion of my fantasy novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter. I wish it were more; four pages is far from enough to satisfy the inner egomaniac. But Rhetorics of Fantasy is not about the specific books discussed therein but, rather, uses those books to demonstrate various critical insights.
That being so, I include this disclaimer not in order to reveal any potential conflict of interest, but to avoid the trap that Isaac Asimov fell into when he blurbed "It is an incredibly wonderful book" for Alexei and Cory Panshin's The World Beyond the Hill, a critical work which concluded that early modern science fiction all led up to and culminated in — Isaac Asimov himself.
I do not delight in Rhetorics of Fantasy because I am in it. I delight in being in it because it is an incredibly wonderful book."
http://michaelswanwick.com/nonfic/rhe...
"So I'm sitting in a bar with a chemist named Jane and a guy who says his name is Tom Nobody, though naturally I have my doubts. Jane is delicately picking the cashews out of the bowl of mixed nuts and eating them one at a time. Tom's positioned himself so he can keep one eye on the door. And I'm talking about how Kevin Maroney hit me up to write this essay.
"I told him I couldn't possibly review Rhetorics of Fantasy," I say. "My mind just doesn't work that way. That's not what I'm for. I don't even read critical works properly — I dive in and out of them at random. If I get bored, I skim. I don't take notes, and I skip most of the footnotes. My reading is disorganized and scattershot."
"So what did Maroney say?" Jane asks.
"He told me to make a virtue out of it. He said I should write something impressionistic. Something scattershot and episodic." . . .
. . .
the dark ambiguities of liminal fantasy as illuminated by the fire sermon
"For those of us previously aware of Farah Mendlesohn's criticism — and who else would spend $27.95 for the Wesleyan University Press trade paperback? — the greatest interest lies in the section on liminal fantasy, a form which she herself defined, and which therefore possesses all the sexiness of the new. Until the form is commonly understood and internalized by the rest of us, there is no way to argue with Mendlesohn's conclusions. . . .
"Slightly over four pages are dedicated to discussion of my fantasy novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter. I wish it were more; four pages is far from enough to satisfy the inner egomaniac. But Rhetorics of Fantasy is not about the specific books discussed therein but, rather, uses those books to demonstrate various critical insights.
That being so, I include this disclaimer not in order to reveal any potential conflict of interest, but to avoid the trap that Isaac Asimov fell into when he blurbed "It is an incredibly wonderful book" for Alexei and Cory Panshin's The World Beyond the Hill, a critical work which concluded that early modern science fiction all led up to and culminated in — Isaac Asimov himself.
I do not delight in Rhetorics of Fantasy because I am in it. I delight in being in it because it is an incredibly wonderful book."
September 16, 2020
This taxonomy of fantasy is both fascinating and frustrating, sometimes alternately, and sometimes at the same time. Mendlesohn describes four categories of fantasy (portal-quest, immersive, intrusive, and liminal) "determined by the means by which the fantastic enters the narrative world". It's an insightful and intuitively appealing system, the general principles of which are well argued and convincing.
The frustrations of Rhetorics of Fantasy come at the level of detail. Each chapter looks at examples of each type at sometimes exhausting length, with copious quotations that do not always illustrate the point they are intended to support as well as they might. The argument is made more difficult to follow than it probably needs to be by the repetitive deployment (although this is perhaps unavoidable in an academic text) of a number of terms - trajectory, thinning, equipoise, download, figure-ground, latency—especially latency! - that start to read like a mantra. Many of them could have been explained more clearly, and earlier. The result is that while the central premise of the book is convincing, the validity of the bottom-up construction of this premise needs to be taken on trust—and while the breadth of Mendlesohn's scholarship is indisputable, her evident preference for some of her categories over others (at one point, portal-quest fantasy is described as dealing in "the superficial factoids of tourism and a sense of wonder" (p. 136)) has a destabilizing effect.
I learned quite a lot from Rhetorics of Fantasy, although less than I had hoped to - which may be due as much to me as it is to Mendlesohn - but it has not inspired me to read much further in the genre. Of the nearly 200 works of fiction referred to (not all of them fantasy) in the book, I've read only 42 (not all of them fantasy). I may add three or four on the strength of their appearance here - Lud-in-the-Mist, perhaps, or Mythago Wood - and Diana Wynne Jones and China Miéville are two frequently-cited writers whose work I have yet to make a start on and should. I can't imagine, though, that fantasy literature is going move up my ranking of preferred reading on the basis of my experience with this book.
The frustrations of Rhetorics of Fantasy come at the level of detail. Each chapter looks at examples of each type at sometimes exhausting length, with copious quotations that do not always illustrate the point they are intended to support as well as they might. The argument is made more difficult to follow than it probably needs to be by the repetitive deployment (although this is perhaps unavoidable in an academic text) of a number of terms - trajectory, thinning, equipoise, download, figure-ground, latency—especially latency! - that start to read like a mantra. Many of them could have been explained more clearly, and earlier. The result is that while the central premise of the book is convincing, the validity of the bottom-up construction of this premise needs to be taken on trust—and while the breadth of Mendlesohn's scholarship is indisputable, her evident preference for some of her categories over others (at one point, portal-quest fantasy is described as dealing in "the superficial factoids of tourism and a sense of wonder" (p. 136)) has a destabilizing effect.
I learned quite a lot from Rhetorics of Fantasy, although less than I had hoped to - which may be due as much to me as it is to Mendlesohn - but it has not inspired me to read much further in the genre. Of the nearly 200 works of fiction referred to (not all of them fantasy) in the book, I've read only 42 (not all of them fantasy). I may add three or four on the strength of their appearance here - Lud-in-the-Mist, perhaps, or Mythago Wood - and Diana Wynne Jones and China Miéville are two frequently-cited writers whose work I have yet to make a start on and should. I can't imagine, though, that fantasy literature is going move up my ranking of preferred reading on the basis of my experience with this book.
April 21, 2023
I enjoyed reading this book. As a newcomer to fantasy and someone who wanted to learn the more theoretical aspects to it, it felt easy to pick up. However, as I looked more into fantasy, I realized this book is a very disappointing view of fantasy. While I understand that the author states that she is focusing more on the rhetorical narratives of the sets, the entire concept of dividing a book into a taxonomical divide just contradicts the point. It limits fantasy and falls into the decades long habit that fantasy has with defining itself. Even though I great disagree with Mendlesohn, I recommend any lover of fantasy reads this book to gain more intellect on the discourse and find their own opinion on the subject.
Read
December 29, 2019Mendlesohn is fascinating and there were absolutely times I felt like I should be taking notes on what to read next and also she and I very clearly have different tastes in books, which is also deeply interesting.
Her intervention is just a little bit mind blowing in how it helps one categorize what books are (or are not).
Her intervention is just a little bit mind blowing in how it helps one categorize what books are (or are not).
March 2, 2020
goed geschreven, over de theorie van fantasy
August 5, 2020
Fantastic! One of the most useful books... actually, make that THE most useful book... I've ever read about the fantasy genre.
September 27, 2020
Interesting book, the four models seem to make sense. However, it's somewhat hard to relate the archetypes to works if you don't know the works Mendlesohn references.
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