Ib Higher English Term 1mr M

IB Higher English

Term 1

Mr M.

Fantastic Literature 1. Fantasy vs Realism. Brainstorming session Opening 1 “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking Thirteen." Opening 2 It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Opening 3 “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Opening 4 You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Opening 5 I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. An unattractive man, I think my liver hurts. Opening 6 “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat; it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.” Opening 7 It was the day my grandmother exploded. Analyse each opening. What does each one tell you about each book? Is it realism or fantasy? How do you know? 2. Definitions: The identifying traits of fantasy are the inclusion of fantastic elements in a self-coherent (internally consistent) setting. [John Clute – Encyclopedia of Fantasy] Within such a structure, any location of the fantastical element is possible: it may be hidden in, or leak into the apparently real world setting, it may draw the characters into a world with such elements, or it may occur entirely in a fantasy world setting, where such elements are part of the world.[ The Romantic: In the late 18th century artists and intellectuals came increasingly to emphasize the role of the emotions in human life and, correspondingly, to play down the importance of reason (which had been regarded as supremely important by thinkers of the Enlightenment). Those involved in the new movement were known as Romantics. Because ‘Romanticism’ emphasised the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal and the spontaneous it often led to works of literature that focused on the strange, the mysterious, even the grotesque. This led to works that dealt with the supernatural such as

Frankenstein. E.T.A. Hoffman’s stories and Alice in Wonderland.

Allegory: (from Greek: αλλος, allos, "other", and αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal. Fictions with several possible interpretations are not allegories in the true sense. Not every fiction with general application is an allegory. [Wikipedia] cf. The Cave in Plato’s Republic. Lord of the Rings as a WW2 allegory Fables: Fable and parable are short, simple forms of naive allegory. The fable is usually a tale about animals who are personified and behave as though they were humans. The device of personification is also extended to trees, winds, streams, stones, and other natural objects. The earliest of these tales also included humans and gods as characters, but fable tends to concentrate on animating the inanimate. A feature that isolates fable from the ordinary folktale, which it resembles, is that a moral—a rule of behaviour—is woven into the story. [Britannica] Folk Tales: Sometimes called fairy tales. Wonder tale involving marvellous elements and occurrences, though not necessarily about fairies.. “Children's and Household Tales,” generally known as Grimm's Fairy Tales) of the Brothers Grimm are transcribed directly from oral renderings. Folk tales have common motifs, that have been categorised by Stith Thomson and V. Propp. Examples of folktale motifs are encounters between ordinary, often humble, human beings and supernatural adversaries such as witches, giants, or ogres; contests to win a bride; and attempts to overcome a wicked stepmother or jealous sisters. The most obvious characteristic of folk literature is its orality. Vladimir Propp's classic study Morphology of the Folktale (1928) became the basis of research into the structure of folklore texts. Propp discovered a uniform structure in Russian fairy tales.

Utopia/Dystopia: (from the Greek meaning no-place.) An ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions. Hence “utopian” and “utopianism” are words used to denote visionary reform that tends to be impossibly idealistic. First created by Thomas More in his book Utopia. Written utopias may be practical or satirical, as well as speculative. In the 20th century the Utopia tended to be replaced by the Dystopia, which is the opposite of a utopia. An oppressive nightmare place.

High Fantasy: Typified by Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. In popular culture, the genre of fantasy

is dominated by its Medievalist form, also known as ‘High Fantasy’ and ‘Sword and Sorcery’.

Science Fiction: Abbreviation SF. A form of fiction that deals principally with the impact of actual or imagined science upon society or individuals. The term science fiction was popularized, if not invented, in the 1920s by one of the genre's principal advocates, the American publisher Hugo Gernsback. Many believe that the first science fiction novel was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Magic Realism: Chiefly Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-offact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction. Although this strategy is known in the literature of many cultures in many ages, the term magic realism is a relatively recent designation, first applied in the 1940s by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who recognized this characteristic in much Latin-American literature. Prominent among the Latin-American magic realists are the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Brazilian Jorge Amado, the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, and the Chilean Isabel Allende. [Britannica]