Archive for Generic

ASAP/11 seminar paper: The Stillness as Land, The Broken Earth as Fantasy

Posted in Conferences, Here at the End of All Things, papers, Uncategorized, Writing with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on 14 October 2019 by Ben

This is my contribution to a seminar at ASAP/11 this past weekend in College Park, MD on NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, a text that, I am sure, needs no introduction.

The seminar was amazing and I want to thank Leif Sorensen and Jessica Hurley for organizing it and inviting me to be part of it. The other contributions were great and the conversation was among the best I have ever had at a conference–both very smart and very much a geeking out session.

In my current book project, Here at the end of all things: Fantasy after History, I begin by theorizing the relationship among fantasy, science fiction ,and horror in order to examine what avenues for thought each genre opens and closes. This theorization leads a reconsideration of fantasy’s development and reception as a genre, especially insofar as fantasy, in its fullest expression, actualizes a ground for history that history cannot provide for itself (a problem historicist genres such as sf often fail to acknowledge and one that antihistoricist genres such as horror do not acknowledge as a problem so much as a given). Fantasy thus acts as a foil for neoliberal capitalism, especially with regard to the latter’s antihistoricist operations, which dovetail with certain aspects of science fiction and, in the end, come to resemble horror. Here, I think about The Broken Earth as fantasy in the context of another of this century’s greatest crises (or constellation of interconnected crises), what we conceptualize by way of “the Anthropocene.” Under the Anthropocene (or one of the many terms competing to identify the broader concept), humanity and its institutions come to understand how the destabilization of the conditions of their history and, thereby, the destabilization of those processes of valorization or meaning-making dependent on historicist and critical thought. The Anthropocene not only reveals the impermanence or finitude of human subjectivity, institutions, nations, and so on—the very impermanence and finitiude that under whose shadow anthropocentric valorziation becomes necessary and possible. The Anthropocene also reveals the impermanence and finitude of the condition for human subjectivities, institutions, nations, and so on—the allegedly stable or “set” materialities that subtend all life on this planet. (Of course, the responsibility for, awareness of, and consequences of the Anthropocene are unevenly distributed across the abstraction “humanity,” to say the least.)
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Attebery on Tolkien, or Lord of the Rings as the returning king

Posted in The Generic with tags , , , , , , , on 28 June 2013 by Ben

Brian Attebery, in The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, writes: “J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, compared to others, is an achievement of such magnitude and assurance that it seems to reshape all definitions of fantasy to fit itself. Indeed, no important work of fantasy written After [sic] Tolkien is free of his influence, and many are merely halting imitations of his style and substance.” Later, in a chapter entitled “After Tolkien,” Attebery continues this line of thought, stating how the publication of LotR

changed the position of fantasy in this country. Even before it became a bestseller and the object of a cult, Tolkien’s story was noted by critics sympathetic to the genre as the workd they had been waiting for, the first extensive exploration of the possibilities of modern fantasy. It seemed on the one hand to sum up the whole Western tradition of the marvelous, with its echoes of Homer, Dantae, and Wagner and its outright borrowings from the Kalevala, the Scandinavian Eddas, Beowulf, the Mabinogion, George MacDonald, and William Morris. On the other hand, the trilogy was an integrated story with a perception and a point of view that many readers found appropriate to the contemporary world: that is, it was not only a culminating work but also a seminal one, a challenge to the reader to go out and create something equally grand and equally magical.

Attebury writes here without irony and without any apparent thought with regard to the way that the reception of Tolkien in the US (and perhaps elsewhere) mirrors the very conventions of the quest fantasy that Lord of the Rings more established singlehandedly. That is,insanely enough, the reception of LotR, as a sort of prophecied chosen one, fits with the quest narrative that it establishes: the “return” of the king who promises a new reign of justice and peace (but who cannot, perhaps given the merely generic nature of what follows [looking at you Terry Brooks], of course, live forever and sets the stage for the disappointment that is his offspring). I don’t mean to fault Attebery here, as he is working on a much different issue than what I am thinking about. I just find it interesting.

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