Hello All,
I'm Claire and I'll warn you at the beginning that I have a tendency to babble, but I'll try to keep this succinct.
I have to confess, I've been a fantasy fan most of my life. My mom read me The Hobbit when I was very little and it's been downhill from there. My taste in fantasy does lean more towards the epic side of things, but I have no problems with the darker sides of the genre. My high school years were spent reading Tolkien (All of Tolkien. Yes, The Silmarillion and the Histories, too.) as well as what seems like every book Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman ever wrote, the Discworld books and all of Neil Gaiman's works (go ahead, ask me how excited I am that he's coming to UA). Right now my favorite series is Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen, mostly because Erikson was a professional archaeologist before turning to writing and it shows.
Because of my interest in fantasy, I jumped at the chance to take this class and I'm really looking forward to an opportunity to discuss and analyze the genre as a whole as well as the specific works on the syllabus.
-C
EDIT: (decided it was silly not to combine posts)
My only reaction to the Clute handout is amazement that no one (including me) thought to bring up Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" as a perfect example of the four-part model. The Sighting would be the beginning when the prince (or was he a nobleman? It's been quite a while since I've read it) sees the devastation the plague is causing and decides to shut himself and his court away. The Thickening could be the description of the various rooms prepared for the Masque with the Revel being the Masque itself and the revelation that the plague has crept into the castle and walks among the party-goers. The Aftermath is, of course, the subsequent deaths of the Prince and all the nobility.
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"The Masque of the Red Death" is indeed a marvelous example of Clute's four-part structure. We somehow failed to make the jump in class from Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, despite its famous scene of Erik coming to the masked ball as the Red Death. Here's a still of Lon Chaney as the Red Death in the 1925 Universal Phantom.
ReplyDeleteProspero was, indeed, a prince. Here's the text of the original Graham's Magazine publication of the story, from 1842, courtesy of the Poe Society of Baltimore.
Claire,
ReplyDeleteI am also a huge Weis and Hickman fan. I see we also have similar thought processes because Phantom of the Opera and subsequently Masque of the Red Death were my first thoughts as we examined Clute's model.
Daniel--Phantom didn't even occur to me, though it seems obvious now. What Weis and Hickman have you read? I read an embarrassing number of the Dragonlance books way back when and the Deathgate Cycle. Loved that one.
ReplyDeleteSorry about the late comment, just remembered the blog's existence.