Footnote #7 - The Fantastic

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 of the fantastic is the subject of Footnote #7, as Alex takes listeners (including Chris) on a journey through the origins of the fantastique and a term that often describes certain stories with impossible elements. Other topics includes the fantastic as initially a literary impulse and fantasy as a genre that codifies dimensions of that impulse into narrative expectations and archetypes; Tzvetan Todorov’s work on “the fantastic” as an historical genre of writing that involves characters experiencing a momentary narrative “hesitation”; psychoanalysis and the uncanny; and what the fantastic means for the reader-/viewer-response of popular fantasy media.

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

Suggested Readings

  • Armitt, Lucie. 1996. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Arnold.

  • Attebery, Brian. 1992. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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

  • Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard, Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantFANTASTIC, FANTASY, STORYTELLING, TODOROV, LITERATUREComment