Читать книгу Rhetorics of Fantasy - Farah Mendlesohn - Страница 17

Chapter 5, considering as it does texts that warp and distort the patterns I have observed (and that may well have produced patterns I cannot yet see), is essential to this book. This book is about rhetorics, not taxonomic phyla. Genre markers (whether tropes or patterns) are useful analytical tools but they are constructions imposed on a literary landscape. The same landscape may be susceptible to quite a different cartography. The books discussed in this chapter may point the way to that other cartography.

I have no category title for the works in chapter 5. “Hybrid forms” would both reify the categories in a way I find uncomfortable and suggest that these texts are “between” things. I am also wary of terminology that implies a link between nonformulaic fantasy and quality. Quality is to be found in every one of the rhetorics I outline and much of this quality has to do with how formulas are exploited. In addition, these texts are, if anything, hyperaware of formula. The texts considered in chapter 5 straddle the forms I have outlined, folding, twisting, and reweaving the material of the fantastic in order to produce texts that depend on our understanding of these forms, yet do something “other.” Each of the books in chapter 5 demonstrates the incredible potential that exists in the genre.