Literature and fantasy. Is it possible to combine both?

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Yeah, little thing called a joke there bud. More pretension, how superb. I suppose your real name is "Chandos the red", eh? I'm sorry I didn't take my username quite as seriously as you did. I suppose it's all good as long as I act in an elitist manner, and go around declaring what is and is not literature. :/

 

Sorry, you didn't get my joke either, "bud."

Can you?

Interesting. But, which critic, Nataben?

 

Pro tip: putting quotation marks and ellipses all over your posts does not make you look enlightened.

 

Thank you for the "tip," Pro....

 

Harold Bloom. He was just saying that Milton's creation is so strange and different (despite its being nominally Christian) that pragmatically the work functions as science fiction. He also recommends reading it consciously as science fiction, especially when you aren't conversant in all his allusions.

Harold Bloom gets a bad rap because he dislikes Harry Potter, Tolkien, etc., but he's actually a huge fan of fantasy from what I can gather. If I can remember the place where I saw him list a few of his favorite fantasy works I'll post them here.

 

We had a debate about Potter books and Bloom's take on them.

http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=30824&highlight=bloom

I read Bloom's _Western Canon_ and thought that he relied too much on Shakespeare as the "center" of all things in literature. I thought his take on Milton, iirc, was how Milton sought to distance himself from Shakespeare, while failing to do so miserably. What bothered me most about that book is with every writer Bloom wrote on, it just gave him another excuse to write about Shakespeare. I agree that Shakespeare is "supreme," but he's not the only game in town.

But any critic who is despised as much as Bloom by the feminist/Marxist crowd, can't be all bad.

I also have his _Modern Critical Views of Chaucer_, and the same thing - He finds another excuse to write about Shakespeare in the intro. Nevertheless, the edition contains some critical writings by Howard, Donaldson and Chesterton.

 

I like to use the division between escapist literature and interpretive literature. Some books are just written for pure fun -- the author might make a few comments on the nature of life but primarily wants to tell a fun story that, through the reading of it, lets us "escape" the mundane world and just chill. Much "pulp" fiction falls onto that side of the equation. Most of the snobby people being pilloried here cite these sorts of stories as not being "literature".

They do this because their definition of literature is interpretive literature -- writing that explores the nature of life, social issues, and other deep, profound stuff. Now, with luck, such stories are interesting and let a reader escape the mundane world, but their primary purpose is to deepen our understanding and challenge our beliefs and preconceptions.

I say that both of these types of literature exists within every genre imaginable. I've seen some very thoughtful horror. I've also read some pure splatterpunk stuff that merely intended to shock the crap out of the reader. I do not see the value in criticizing the latter for not being the former, as long as the doesn't claim it to be the former. Both forms have their role and their place.