Bill Oram
> At the same time many of the enthusiastic defenders of fantasyŻour
studentsŻare equally undiscriminating and this makes usŻor at least
meŻuneasy. They don't see all that great a difference between Spenser and
Tolkien and indeed between Tolkien and Robert Jordan. I think that part of
the need to draw lines in the sand has to do with the sense that books in
which we're heavily invested are coming under attack by being confused with
books that are harder to defend. And that in a climate dismissive of much
that we give our lives to.
Ain't that the truth? I think this is a very healthy thread, in that is
forcing us to face the fact that we (and others) tend to compartmentalize
our aesthetic standards according to chronology: fantasy and unironic
grandeur of language are fine when Homer, Virgil, Dante and Spenser use
them, but become at best 'minor' and at worst embarrassing when practised,
say, post WWI - at which point we unconsciously don the mantle of the
modernist aesthetic (and yes, I know I'm oversimplifying), and disdain
fantasy except when it comes trimmed with sophisticated scare quotes. Of
course, we might want to argue that it isn't fantasy so much as Tolkien's
particular offerings in that line that we dislike, but in that case where
are the other modern fantasists at the heart of the twentieth-century canon?
Considering that fantasy was arguably . the dominant mode in western
literature until the Enlightenment, their absence should give everyone, and
especially Spenserians, pause.
Charlie
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