the repaganizing of fantasy

When classes ended in May, I was with my wife in the hospital, so I couldn’t wrap up my classes appropriately. Instead, I recorded brief audio lectures. Below you’ll find a transcription (with links added) of the lecture I sent to my class on Fantasy. I have resisted the temptation to clean it up, to nuance my arguments, etc. This is almost exactly what I said, for better or worse. In one sense, as I told you back at the beginning of class, fantasy is the normal or typical mode of storytelling. If you go back to the Odyssey, or if you go even further back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, you have gods, demigods, supernatural forces, witches, haunted forests, people with superhuman strength — the whole package, basically. And that is the mode. You still see that mode of storytelling — not as dominant, but you still see it — in the sixteenth century, in, for instance, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. You have, of course, as I described in class, all those border ballads, like “Thomas the Rhymer,” from…