Footnote #52 - Rhetorics of Fantasy

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes continue with this latest examination of the many ‘rhetorics’ of fantasy that account for the mechanics by which fantasy writers can and do achieve their fantastical effects. Drawn from Farah Mendlesohn’s influential work on fantasy literature Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), this Footnote has Alex reflect on the categorisation of fantasy and the value of Mendlesohn’s self-declared “tour around the skeletons and exoskeletons of the genre” to distinguish and divide kinds of storytelling practices; the distinctions between intrusive, immersive, portal quest, and liminal fantasy stories, and what these modes mean for narrative structure, world-building, rules, and characterisation; the disruptions that fantasy makes to a world that is ‘already known’ and the game it plays with our assumptions of mimetic fiction; and the way that Mendlesohn’s typology of fantasy illuminates both the way that the genre’s stories are told and the address that these narratives make to the spectator.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

Suggested Readings

  • Irwin, William Robert. 1976. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

  • Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

  • Sergeant, Alexander. 2021. Encountering the Impossible: The Fantastic in Hollywood Fantasy Cinema. New York: SUNY Press.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantTHEORY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, UNCONSCIOUSComment