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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Bleg: French Fantasy
From my friend Tim Perper:
Two questions, actually, both bibliographic, more or less.
1. Do you know of any French literary critics who have dealt PRIMARILY with fantasy in the most general sense (NOT a publishing category)? By “fantasy,” I mean stories like “Lord of the Rings,” “Treasure Island,” Oz, “Alice in Wonderland,” Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, usw, (either written or in film). By “primarily,” I mean fantasy is the central focus, rather than being a side issue to things the writer thinks is more important?
2. Do any of the French Theorists—the usual suspects: Lacan, Foucault, Irigaray, Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Beaudrillard, usw—deal anywhere with literary or cinematic fantasy? Again, I mean as a major focus of the essay, not as a footnote to Freud. They’ve written about cinema (or Derrida has) but I mean fantasy fiction and film in specific.
If you Google Derrida and cinema, you will encounter a delightful and very funny video of him expatiating in the most charming manner to a very pretty young woman about being a ghost in the film “they” are making of him talking about ghosts to a very pretty young woman in a film. It doesn’t take her very long to fall totally in love. But that’s not what I mean. I mean “Beaudrillard on Bradbury” or “Kristeva on Alice.”
Tim
Comments
Didn’t Meillassoux write a book on sci fi? Here’s the Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7NNupYqnR8
However, the great book on fantastic worlds in french theory is still Louis Marin’s book on Utopia.
maybe too obvious or not appropriate: Introduction à la littérature fantastique, by Tzvetan Todorov, translated as ‘The fantastic : a structural approach to a literary genre’
Lewis Carroll was important to Deleuze. See the short piece in Essays Critical And Clinical for starters.
Foucault’s early book on Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth, might be worth a look.
I have no answer to the question, I just wanted to ask: how did Treasure Island get on that list? In what sense is it fantasy?
Thanks to everyone who supplied names and cites—it doesn’t seem that there is very much. I am currently reading Thomas Lamarre’s “The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation,” which tries, in part, to bring a Lacanian perspective to understanding Japanese animation—but not too many other writers seem to be attempting this sort of synthesis. Oh well…
Thanks again for all the leads.
Tim Perper