A Multicultural Utopia Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles

A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint's Moonheart

Utopia “Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation. ” -Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia, ” 35.

The Politics of Fantasy: “the formal “meeting ground between empirical and traditional world views. ” Attebery, “Politics, ” 10. But the form of the novel is: “not so much an organic unity as a symbolic act that must reunite or harmonize heterogenous narrative paradigms which have their own specific and contradictory ideological meaning. ” -Jameson, Unconscious, 130 -1.

Contemporary Fantasy Contemporary fantasy: “sets the mundanity of the present day in clear opposition to the fantasy premise. ” -Clute, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 225.

Imperialist Tradition

New Fantasy New fantasy lets authors go beyond the “dyad of colonizer/colonized” (Steven 62).

Multiculturalism

The Otherworld: Place of the Druid and Shaman Druid

The Forest Lord's Speech “I would have you accept a new Way. Truth wears many faces, Red-Spear. Many paths lead to one destination. It is the spirit that will not accept change that will dwindle and be lost. […] There can be no return to the old ways. Life goes on […] If it were otherwise, life would be stagnant. ” -de Lint, Moonheart, 384. http: //www. yuzyk. com/multicult-e. shtml

Liberal Multiculturalism Liberal multiculturalism is predicated on the “natural equality” between all races that enables them “to compete equally in a capitalist society, ” a view that “often collapses into an ethnocentric and oppressively universalistic humanism” that identifies the norm of acceptability with “Anglo-American culturalpolitical communities” (Mc. Laren 51).

Historicizing Moonheart's Multiculturalism 1971: Introduction of Canada's Mulitcultural Policy 1984: Publication of Moonheart 1988: Canadian Multiculturalism Act 2005: Christine Mains calls Moonheart a “multicultural utopia” (348).

Romance and the Other An Other is considered “evil because he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar” (Jameson Unconscious 101). The good/evil ideologeme of romance is “a form of social praxis, that is, as a symbolic resolution to a concrete historical situation. ” -Jameson, Unconscious, 104. “[T]he 'experience' or the seme of evil [is] expelled from the realm of interpersonal or inner-wordly relations [to] be projectively reconstituted into a free-floating and disembodied element. ” Jameson, Unconscious, 106 -7.

Mal'ek'a: Some Names for the Dread-that-Walks-Nameless “from over the great water” (20) “the white man's curse” (366)

Garrison Mentality

Mal'ek'a: Some Names for the Dread-that-Walks-Nameless “from over the great water” (20) “the white man's curse” (366) “the evil of our ancestors given a life of its own” (416)

Intrusion Fantasy “In intrusion fantasy the fantastic is the bringer of chaos. […] It is horror and amazement. It takes us out of safety without taking us from our place. The intrusion fantasy is not necessarily unpleasant, but it has as its base the assumption that normality is organized, and that when the fantastic retreats the world, while not necessarily unchanged, returns to predictability―at least until the next element of the fantastic intrudes. ” -Mendlesohn, Rhetorics, xxi-xxii.

'Indigenous' Fantasy Indigenous fantasy brings “the fantastic into the cities” in order to add “complex historical layers” to modern America or, equally often, they use European folklore simply to say, “The modern world is boring, there must be something more than this” (Mendlesohn 147).

Tamson House Approximate Location

Literature of Vision A literature of vision makes us “feel the limitations of our notions of reality, often by presenting one that seems more rich, more intense, more coherent (or incoherent), or somehow more significant” (Hume 82). It enters “our consciousness not as verbal argument to be accepted or rejected on logical grounds, but as a vision” (Hume 101).

Space and the State On the state's production of homogenous space: “Through its control, the state tends to accentuate the homogeneous character of space, which is fractured by exchange. This space of state control can also be defined as being optical and visual. The human body has disappeared into a space that is equivalent to a series of images […] In modern space, the body no longer has a presence; it is only represented, in a spatial environment reduced to its optical components. ” 88. -Lefebvre, “State, ”

Conclusion Key terms: -new fantasy -romance -the production of space -realism -hybridity -liberal multiculturalism -representational space -latency -imperialist tradition -intrusion fantasy -rhetoric -literature of vision

Conclusion

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