study literature as such, rather than using it as a pretext to theorize in the manner of whichever
theory or conceptual apparatus appears to be in vogue at the moment.
Genre Crisis
Directly affected by the textual confusion enforced by postmodern theory that would
have us believe that we can actually read a train schedule as if it were a novel (Eagleton 8),
generic studies have been left aside, and therefore, we are not much wiser today than we were
thirty years ago when it comes to distinguishing the fantastic from the marvelous or horror from
science fiction, which all blend together to create a somewhat vague “mode,” propitious to
over-conceptualized speculations of a would-be philosophical nature: since post- structuralism
does not seem to care about the obvious differences between literary works and literary
inquiries, chances are that it would be even less interested in distinguishing “The Little Red
Riding Hood" from Nightmare on Elm Street - or a sonnet from a tax income form for that
matter.
In spite of some efforts, mainly in French and Spanish (Ferreras Savoye, 1995,19962014, Roas 2010, 2011), the fantastic - as a genre or a mode - remains as undefined as ever,
as shown by the fairly recent special issue of Comparative Literature and Culture Studies
devoted to the fantastic, New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature, which exhibits a general
disorientation as to what one may conceive as “the fantastic,” as well as regarding its possible
materializations; although the issue is entitled “New Studies on the Fantastic in Literature,”
most of the essays that compose it deal with films rather than texts,3 and cover a wide range of
narrative genres or modes, from horror to science fiction, from African fairy tales to CyberPunk, allegedly “post-human” narrations, leaving the reader with the impression that, in the
end, any literature which strays from a direct representation of reality as we collectively
perceive it is susceptible to be "fantastic,” and hence fair game for abstract speculations within
the conceptual frames of philosophy, sociology and, of course, psychoanalysis.
This un-definition of a very specific literary and narrative occurrence such as the
modern fantastic is in actuality celebrated by some critics, such as Lucie Armitt, who
enthusiastically states in her introduction to Contemporary Women Fiction and the Fantastic
that:
3 Against fashionable but unnecessarily confusing terminological trends that insist in calling a film - and
everything else - a “text," I prefer to use both words, “text" and “film," to refer to two distinct types of narration, the
written and the visual.
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