ENGL 349
Fantasy

Course Introduction

Offering a course on fantasy is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is that the works to choose from are many and the principles for choosing are either contested or murky. We can only read a handful of books here, and so I have made them as varied as possible in order that when you finish with English 349, you have some feel for the range of fantasy. It is my sense of that range which is operating in my choice of readings, and other lovers of fantasy would surely divide the subject differently and select other works to study. But I am sure they would agree with me that the reading for English 349 introduces you to fantasy and allows for further reading to go off in all sorts of directions. It is my hope that when you finish this course, you will pursue some of those directions.

I have divided the course into seven lessons (excluding Lesson Eight, "Preparation for the Final Examination"), which I will describe in just a moment. The first and most important thing you must keep in mind is that you are to do only four of the first seven lessons. You must do Lesson One and then three of the following six lessons. My description of the lessons will give you some information for deciding which three to do, but it is entirely up to you to choose. I give you this choice for two reasons: (l) it allows you to tailor English 349 to a great extent to your own preferences in fantasy, and (2) it takes into account that these days books go in and out of print with great frequency.

Should books be out of print and unavailable in second-hand book stores or your local library, then a particular lesson might not be an option—which only confirms my second reason for writing seven lessons. Once you finish with the required first lesson and the three lessons of your choice, you will take a final examination. I will discuss the exam in Lesson Eight.

About the Required Texts

As I write this, all the required texts are in print and available at the University of Washington Bookstore. You may purchase them there, but I will be just as happy if you find them in used bookstores or check them out of libraries. I don't say this because I have anything against the University Bookstore, but rather because I am thinking of your bank account. At any rate, the point is to read the books, not to fuss over the edition used.

Course Objectives

Before I go further, let me list for you the aims of this course. By the end of English 349 I would like you to have

• a sense of how varied fantasy is;
• some knowledge of characteristic themes and styles employed by writers of fantasy;
• an understanding of why humans produce fantasy and are interested in reading it;
• a feel for the uses to which our culture puts fantasy;
• an increased ability to read with pleasure and insight; and
• an increased ability to write with more control and complexity about what you read.

Needless to say, I will approach these aims in different ways throughout the course material, and you will find yourself interested in pursuing some at the expense of others; but it seems only fair at the beginning to lay out for you the broadest sense of what I have in mind for English 349 and my most ideal hopes for what you will get out of it.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the discussion forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. I will reply to all discussion forum questions on the forum, and to e-mail questions via e-mail.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Organization of the Course

As I said earlier, there are seven lessons in English 349 (excluding the final exam). I will briefly describe each here, and as you read my descriptions, please remember that you must do the first lesson (Tolkien) and any three of the following six:

Lesson One: The Essence of Fantasy

I ask you to read Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings because it seems to me to come closest to what most readers think of when they hear the word fantasy. The three-part novel has it all: great invention, wide scope, heroism, the battle with evil, the dangers of power, enough similarity with human life to make it real and enough difference to make it unreal. Think of The Lord of the Rings as occupying the center of a circle called "fantasy" and the other books in this course as satellites positioned around that center.

Lesson Two: Questioning Reality

Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five are both books that make it impossible for readers to know if they are to take the central events as real or imagined. As opposed to Lord of the Rings, where the fictional reality, though like ours in many ways, is definitely not real, the two novels in this lesson ask us to step back and rethink what we mean by "real." If you are interested in the philosophical aspects of that question you will find the novels in this lesson interesting and challenging.

Lesson Three: The Personal Is the Political

The title of this lesson derives from a motto of contemporary feminism, and hence the two novels assigned (Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus) are both efforts by women to use fantasy to explore how women's private lives have been constructed by the public political processes dominated by men. The Handmaid's Tale is a worst-case fantasy about that process, and Nights at the Circus is a wildly inventive portrait of how to circumvent it. Given the contemporary importance of the issues raised by both books, I hope you will choose to read them.

Lesson Four: Animals Are Human

Though Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind and the Willows are widely thought to be children's books, I am absolutely convinced that they also have their place in a reading list for adult students of fantasy. By fantasizing that animals are very much like humans, except in biological appearance, the two books allow us to see ourselves in dramatic and useful ways. If we don't like what we see, we can always pretend that the books are about animals; but the books insist that fantasy worlds populated by animals have a great deal to show us about ourselves. These books also suggest a way we can escape from ourselves, or at least from that part which is represented by work, responsibility, and grimness.

Lesson Five: Life Is a Game

When we play chess, we do not think we are playing at life but engaging in a rule-governed activity aside from life. But Lewis Carroll, in the two Alice books, asks us to consider a world in which the sort of complex rules that make for chess (or riddles, or crossword puzzles, or many other things) are in fact structuring that world. Through his two fantasies, Carroll forces us to rethink the foundations of our world by giving us worlds with seemingly unworldly foundations.

Lesson Six: Fantasy as Best Seller

The Harry potter novels have swept the world, making J.K. Rowling in the process the richest woman in England. It is worth looking into what makes books popular in general and the Potter books popular in particular. But popular books can address serious issues, and in Lesson seven, we will see how the Potter books do just that.

Lesson Seven: The Metaphysics of Fantasy

Metaphysics is that branch of philosophy concerned with being itself, and the fantastic fiction of Kafka and Borges extends the inquiries of metaphysics through imagined rather than systematic methods. Reading their fiction, we are brought up against the limits of our understanding, the mysteries of lives, the unmapped areas of imagination. It might be said that Kafka and Borges fantasize about fantasy, and in so doing, they provide a suitable stopping place for this course.

Lesson Eight: Preparing for the Final Examination

This lesson describes the nature of the examination and how you can prepare to take it.

Navigating the Course

This section contains the nuts and bolts of the course. There is, of course, more substance with respect to the books you are reading in what I write in the various lessons, but here I will cover my assumptions, expectations, and advice for the course, as well as background material pertaining to fantasy. This is where you will learn about me and what pedagogical views I hold. If you make use of what I say here, I think you will find the course more accessible and interesting, and your final grade much to your liking.

Using the Course Material

In every lesson, I strongly encourage you to read the assigned fiction before you read what I have to say. This does not mean that what I have to say about individual examples of fantasy is worth skipping, only that I think it is important for you to form your opinions about a work before you encounter mine. Furthermore, if you read what I have written before you read a book, you may find that I have given away its ending and deprived you of one of the pleasures of reading. One aim of this course is to make you a better reader of fantasy, and if you lean too heavily on what I have to say about a book before you have digested it, it will be harder for you to fulfill that aim. We are always the better when we begin with our own center rather than borrowing one from someone else.

Consistent with the advice in the previous paragraph, I strongly discourage you from going to the library to find commentaries on fantasy. Having been a student myself, I know the motive for seeking out those commentaries. We all want to stand on solid ground, and to approach paper writing with as little apprehension as possible. But the trouble is that what you will find on fantasy in the library is written by professionals for professionals. When a nonprofessional tries to use the commentaries on fantasy that are available in the library, the results are almost never positive. You will do better in English 349 if you stick to this online syllabus and trust yourself, your intelligence, and your own ideas.

Once you have read the assigned books for a lesson, then it is time for you to read what I have written. As you do so, try to remember the following. First, I have been teaching and writing about literature for a number of years. I do it with a confidence, insight, clarity (and perhaps arrogance?) that I did not have when I was in your shoes. So do not compare what you write about fantasy with what I have written. Second, despite the fact that I am a "professional" student of literature, I am still one person among many, limited by my perspective, prejudices, and commitments. What I have to say in the course about fantasy is my effort to tell the truth about it as I know it, but it is not the Truth. I am not infallible. Hence, when you find yourself disagreeing with some general proposition I advance about fantasy or with some specific claim I make about a book, try to take what I have to say seriously, but do not abandon your position if you find what I say unconvincing. I do not grade on agreement.

About Reading

There is no room in this course for an introduction to literary analysis, but a few words of advice might be helpful. I want to stress for a start that the difference between reading for a course and just plain reading is that the role of pleasure is different. I hope you will enjoy the books in this course, but that's not exactly the point—for reading in a literature course is about understanding. The burden of this section is to explain understanding.

Reading for understanding means noticing and thinking about things you don't need in order to follow the story line. You are already such a good reader that you follow the story line of a book without much mental effort; but you may not be used to noticing the structure of sentences, the order in which things are told, the resonances of particular words, repetitions and echoes, things that aren't said, the writer's choice of images or comparisons, and the way images and comparisons may recur and form patterns. The difference between noticing and not noticing such things is what often makes students think there are hidden messages in texts. Unless writers use codes, though, there is no way they can hide messages in their books, but they may well expect us to notice the significance of a character's name (Billy Pilgrim, for example, in Slaughterhouse-Five), or that he only appears at night, or that he is consistently compared to a snake or to King Arthur. Reading for understanding depends on noticing such things.

But how, you may well ask, can you be sure that something you notice is meaningful? After all, an author has to name a character, and you can never be entirely sure if the name is accidental or significant. That is where your powers of reason come in. Once, for example, you notice Billy Pilgrim's last name, you can begin to ask if Slaughterhouse-Five is the kind of book in which Vonnegut might want a pilgrim to appear. Or if Billy is the kind of man who could be called a pilgrim. Or if thinking of Billy as a pilgrim makes the novel mean more to you. You can argue either way on all three of those issues, and that is the nature of literary understanding. It is the application of reason to observation in order to produce something beyond the story line.

A good way to illustrate the process of noticing and thinking about what you notice is to look at the opening paragraphs of a couple of books. Here is the way William Morris's The Wood Beyond the World, an early fantasy, begins:

A while ago there was a young man dwelling in a great and goodly city by the sea which had the name Langton on Holm. He was but of five and twenty winters, a fair-faced man, yellow-haired, tall and strong; rather wiser than foolisher than young men are mostly wont; a valiant youth and a kind; not of many words but courteous of speech; no roisterer, naught masterful, but peaceable and knowing how to forbear; in fray a perilous foe, and a trusty war-fellow. His father, with whom he was dwelling when this tale begins, was a great merchant, richer than a baron of the land, a head-man of the greatest of the Lineages of Langton, and a captain of the Porte; he was of the Lineage of the Goldings, therefore he was called Bartholomew Golden, and his son Golden Walter.

Now this is standard exposition, and there's no difficulty with understanding what we're being told about our hero, Golden Walter, but there are some suggestive things about the way Morris tells us. The first thing to notice is the old-fashioned, even archaic language in the paragraph. It is reminiscent of medieval English poetry or of the early translations of the Norse sagas, and the names in the paragraph reinforce that impression. All of this recalls the title of the book, The Wood Beyond the World, with its implications of fairy tales taking place long ago. The language, names, and title taken together suggest that the models for Morris's fantasy world are going to lie in England's past (with links to sagas and romances); that fact, though it registers almost subliminally, is likely to mean a world of low technology, sparse population, hierarchical organization (from kings to serfs), and beautiful women as the reward for heroism. In other words, what we have learned to expect from medieval romances comes to mind when we carefully read Morris's opening paragraph. We should not be surprised if the novel depicts a familiar moral and ethical universe in which courage and strength are a man's supreme virtues, and chastity is a woman's virtue—a universe in which the fates of nations and persons rest on prowess in battle and a warrior is more valuable and interesting than a maidservant.

Whether what we infer from the beginning of Morris's novel bears out depends, of course, on reading the whole book, and that is not part of this course. But by now I think you see what I mean by "reading for understanding." Let me extend your sense of the process by taking up another first paragraph, this one from Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros:

There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale, set in a gray old garden where yew-trees flourished that had seen Vikings in Copeland in their seedling time. Lily and rose and larkspur bloomed in the borders, and begonias with blossoms big as saucers, red and white and pink and lemon-colour, in the beds before the porch. Climbing roses, honeysuckle, clematis, and the scarlet flame-flower scrambled up the walls. Thick woods were on every side without the garden, with a gap north-eastward opening on the desolate lake and the great fells beyond it: Gable rearing his crag-bound head against the sky from behind the straight clean outline of the screes.

It is useful to consider this opening against Morris's, and what strikes me initially is the different pace of Eddison's paragraph. Morris was briskly informative, and told us a lot about Walter, while Eddison is in no hurry and tells us nothing at all about his main character except his name. What seems important to Eddison is a kind of visual sensuality: the beauty of the flowers and their colors, the view of the "desolate" lake, the contrast between mountain and sky. Landscape is as important, and perhaps more so, than the main character, Gable. It looks as though Eddison is as interested in creating images as in telling a story, and enjoying images may be central to the kind of experience he is trying to convey. To be blind to this will make us impatient with Eddison's quite long novel and unaware that in Eddison's fictional universe it is worth the narrator's time to describe a garden to us. Reading for understanding entails accepting the novel we get and not trying to make it into the last one we read.

In contrast to Eddison's opening, let me take as our last example of a beginning paragraph the one from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.

The opening poses an entirely different question for us: who is speaking here? Is Vonnegut the novelist one of the characters in his own novel? Is what we're reading fiction or fact? There's no story yet to make inferences about, so the focus of the first paragraph isn't on story or even on a fictional world, but on the relationship between this novel and reality. This book that purports to be a novel, and is included in this course in fantasy, begins by saying, "All this happened." Given this, as we read Vonnegut's novel, we probably ought to keep our eyes open to the question of what it means to say something is "real" and to the related question of why people make up stories. We also ought to think about the role of the author/narrator, and to his interpretations and asides. The real world, the historical one in which World War II took place, is going to be of considerable importance, and commentary on that world may be the motive for the story in a way that's not always the case in fantasy.

In each of the opening paragraphs I have examined, the writer is saying more than the literal surface states—about the kind of story it's going to be, about the kinds of responses a reader might have, about the imaginative space the writer and reader share. Critical reading, what I have been calling reading for understanding and which takes considerable practice, turns out to be a matter of observing everything being said. Just as many of us have learned to read the body language of our friends as they speak words, so we need to remember when we read fantasy, that more is being told than the story. Reading for understanding is learning to see the body language of authors.

Writing

There are four papers and one final examination in this course. Topics and directions appear at the end of each lesson in the course material, but here is what I want to say generally about writing. The best advice I can give to help you write well is something you will often find hard to take. It is this: you have to reread—and in some cases reread again and again—the assigned books in a lesson, and you will also have to rewrite, and in some cases rewrite again, your assignment for a lesson. I know this advice sounds tiresome, daunting, and too teacherly, but I speak from my conviction that the main reason student writing does not rise to the levels it is capable of is that most students write before they know what they are talking about. Rereading and rewriting allow us to speak from knowledge and understanding. My job in this course is to help you realize your potential, and I offer rereading and rewriting not out of some sadistic pleasure, but because I know you will perform better if you follow my advice.

If the above paragraph is about a condition for writing well, the aim in this and the three following paragraphs is to give you my sense of what good writing is. First of all, good spelling, grammar, and syntax are not the sole ingredients of good writing. They are instead conventions we follow if we wish to be members in good standing of the writing public. If we violate these conventions, we invite others to think of us as they do when we defy other conventions. Avoid writing rudely, but do not conclude that in doing so you will automatically turn out good writing.

To produce good writing, you have to write in a human voice. This is one that is neither generic (generic voices are those often employed by people who sell used cars or solicit us by phone), nor formulaic (a formulaic voice is one that automatically announces at the beginning of a paper that "in this essay I will. . ."), nor borrowed from someone who already has a voice in writing (don't try to sound like me, for example). It is the voice that includes the pronoun "I" when it is appropriate; it is a voice that is sad when you are sad, angry when you are angry, excited when you are excited. If you write with your own voice, you have a much greater chance of turning out good writing.

Good writing also requires that you care about what you write. If you are taking English 349 for purely cynical reasons, you will approach the writing in it cynically and without any interest except in finishing the course to receive credit for it. If you are not interested in your writing, the writing will be dead. Furthermore, if you are not interested in it, can you really expect me to be? Do you want me to respond to your papers cynically, to grade them only in order to get paid for doing so? The answers to these two rhetorical questions are obvious, and so I will end my sermon. But I do want to acknowledge that students often feel a need to slight what they are interested in when writing because the teacher has the power of the grade and because too often teachers use it in unconscionable ways. As I have said before, I do not grade on your agreement with me. Be interested in what you write and I will be too, and that cannot help but increase my valuation of your writing.

Finally, you will produce good writing if you read well, and I have already addressed earlier what it means to read for understanding in a general sense. In the next section I will discuss fantasy specifically, and if you combine what I say there with what I said earlier about reading, you will be prepared to read well in this course. Such reading will produce good writing.

A Note about Submitting Assignments

You will complete Assignment 1, and then you will choose three of the six lessons that follow to complete; thus you will write a total of four essays plus the final examination.

Please see the "About Your Instructor" page for information about submitting assignments.

Evaluation

Before moving on to the lessons themselves, I need to take up the dreaded issue of grades. The four papers and the final exam in this course each count as one-fifth of your final grade, but because it takes a while for us to get to know each other, I will make allowances for improvement in the course. If you steadily produce better work, your final grade will reflect that fact.

At the same time, I know that you will worry about being evaluated; I worry about it also. I hope I can ease the worry as follows. First, I know my political, religious, and ethical biases, and I keep them out of my grading. If a paper truly upsets me, however, I make an extra effort to give it the benefit of the doubt. In other words, I think you will receive fair treatment from me. Also, I try to explain my evaluations when I return papers to you. If my explanations make sense, I hope you will try to write your next paper with them in mind. If an explanation does not make sense to you, let me know; I am always happy to reconsider an evaluation if you find my explanation of it inadequate.

Finally, I hope I can inspire your confidence in me by explaining what I take evaluation to be in the case of writing papers about fantasy. It is not at all like marking a problem in mathematics; it is much more like deciding who gets into a symphony orchestra or onto a professional basketball team. If a mathematics teacher sets a problem in quadratic equations, anyone given the answer can mark a particular solution accurately. But only those with years of inside experience can make truly informed and defensible decisions about whom to select for a symphony or a team. This doesn't mean that they can't be "wrong" or that they are free from biases; it only means that in some areas evaluation is something that comes more easily for those who have been on the inside for a long time. Given that I have been teaching for a number of years, I believe I am as good at grading a paper about a work of fantasy as a professional basketball coach is at choosing players for a team. My problem is not whether I can grade you well, but whether I can explain my grading well. But conductors and coaches have the same problem. It goes with any human activity that is unlike mathematics—that is, an activity involving interpretation.

About the Course Developer

Malcolm Griffith is an associate professor emeritus in the University of Washington English Department. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State. During his graduate studies and since that time, three main areas of study have held his interest: Twentieth Century Literature, Modern Criticism, and American Literature.

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