Fantasy i postmodernizm
Fantasy and Postmodernism

Author(s): Piotr Stasiewicz
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Ośrodek Badawczy Facta Ficta
Keywords: fantasy;fantasy fiction;fantasy genre;fantasy literature;postmodern;postmodernism;postmodern theory;postmodernity;
Summary/Abstract: Piotr Stasiewicz’s opening chapter aims at analysing the best known contemporary theories of postmodernism and specifying the relationships between postmodern thought and fantasy fiction. The text describes Brian McHale’s theory that brings out a clear discrepancy between modernism, understood in epistemological paradigm, and postmodernism, emphasizing the ontological paradigm and manifesting in imagining fictional worlds. Stasiewicz proceeds then with presenting Linda Hutcheon’s claim accentuating an unavoidable textuality—and, thereby, subjectivity—of culture, and Bran Nicol’s opinions on metafiction as a key strategy of postmodernism. Correlations between fantasy and modernism and postmodernism are tackled in due course. As pointed out by researchers studying the problem, Brian Attebery and Jim Casey, fantasy, on the one hand, produces a dissonance against tendencies synchronically observable in mainstream fiction, and on the other hand, paradoxically, aligns with antirealistic and metafictional tendencies in postmodern culture. According to both scholars, the ongoing functioning of fantasy as a genre proves the growing late-twentiethcentury predilection towards abandonment of the poetics of representation and socially- dependent literature in favour of accepting goals typical for postmodernism: world creation, world-building irony, and play with convention.

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