ENCW 202 Spring 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 18th, 2020
(Pardon the photoshop. I’m not an illustrator.) Definitions Elevated: Similar to our world, with things added in. Mostly plausible. Whimsical: Fundamentally different from our world. Mostly implausible. Transcendent: Lines between plausible and impossible are blurred.
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 18th, 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
The Three Mountain Task is a child psychological experiment developed by Jean Piager and Bärbel Inhelder to study a child’s ability to coordinate spatial perspectives. Encyclopedia defines the task as “a child faced a display of three model mountains while a researcher placed a doll at different viewpoints of the display. The researcher asked the […]
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
Posted in dystopia, Fantastic, Reality, time on Apr 16th, 2020
Posted in Fantastic, Reality, Transformations on Apr 11th, 2020
In “Eisenheim the Illusionist” you are led to believe that you should follow the rule of the show and don’t tell, this is, however, a magician’s world. Millhauser has chosen his time frame with care: he tells us in the very first sentence that “[i]n the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire […]
Posted in Art, Desire, Desperation, Fantastic, Obsession on Apr 10th, 2020
“Change in Fashion”’s imagery reminds me of The Handmaid’s Tale; color-coordinated by social class, the female body is hidden by long sleeves and “wings” to hide their faces when out of the house. This short story went on to tell us how the female body slipped deeper into the shadows yet became increasingly more provocative. […]
Posted in Autonomy, Captivity, Consent, Desire, Desperation, Fantastic on Apr 6th, 2020
In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” the narrator spends a lot of his time explaining things to “future readers.” In the first paragraph, he writes: Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes […]
As I was reading “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” I started thinking about “In the Reign of Harad IV” and how, in both stories, nothing was ever enough. They are both always striving to do more and better work than what they had already achieved to the point that it becomes unrealistic and fantastic. They both are […]
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 1st, 2020
This story has less of a fantastic element incorporated in it. They always say fashion can repeat itself and it most certainly did in this story. However, it truly conveys a deeper message than what is on the surface. Clearly, this “A Change in Fashion” is about new, victorian-like dresses that are made that cover […]
Because of the fantastic talent of its protagonist, Harlan Crane, and the mysteriousness of his character, Millhauser’s “Precursor of the Cinema” seems like fiction. On the contrary, there are various instances throughout the tale that demand it be taken as truth. The beginning of the short story reads like a research paper or a historical […]
Posted in Fantastic, Longing for Answers, Mystery, Point of View on Mar 30th, 2020
When I first read about the moving paintings in Steven Millhauser’s “A Precursor of the Cinema,” I was reminded of the moving paintings in the Harry Potter series, the ones that talked and moved from frame to frame, interacting with both the students and the subjects of the other paintings. In Harry Potter, we know […]
Posted in Autonomy, Defiance, Desire, Disappearance, Fantastic, Isolation, Obsession on Mar 29th, 2020
As I was preparing to write this post, I became curious about fashion trends throughout history that we, as modern people, might consider fantastic if there was no evidence to support their existence. One example is lotus shoes, which can only be worn by women with bound feet; foot binding was an ancient tradition for […]
Posted in Fantastic, Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 26th, 2020
Of course, as we all know the entire novel OHYOS is fantastic — from the timeline, the gypsies, the incest, and the naiveté of the people of Macondo. In the second half of OHYOS there is many fantastic elements in the story. For example, when José Arcadio dies, the blood from his ear forms a trail that […]
Posted in Fantastic, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 24th, 2020
One Hundred Years of Solitude demonstrates the extent to which the fragile distinction between reality and fantasy depends on the context and assumptions of time and place. The banana company, as well as Fernanda’s delusions of being a queen, are both powerful examples of how even frustrated ambition ultimately leads a person to succumb to a […]
Posted in Fantastic, fear, Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Social Fears, Transformations, Utopia on Mar 21st, 2020
How many years does it take for something to finally be viewed as fantastic? Five? Twenty? One hundred? I found myself pondering this as I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. As the years go by, we see bits and pieces of the modern world beginning to make their way into the isolated Macondo—the railroad, […]
Posted in Captivity, Desperation, dystopia, Fantastic, Isolation, Loneliness, Longing for Answers, Mystery, Obsession on Mar 19th, 2020
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” We’ve all heard of cabin fever. Well, welcome to self-quarantine during the Coronavirus, with social distancing and young folks who are being advised to stay far away from the Boomers. So far my room is clean; we created an at-home office for me in the old guest room; […]
Posted in Fantastic, Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 19th, 2020
Garcia Marquez weaves countless varieties of the fantastic into the first forty pages of his novel. Starting from the opening line, we are given both future and past at the same time. “Many years later,” we are told, “as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his […]