Childhood is based around fantastic ideas, children can pretend to be anything they want to be, but what happens when the children grow up? Can they still pretend? Of course they can and that’s where the beauty of the fantasy genre lies. As mentioned in the book, people love to attack the fantasy genre of literature because it is not real, but is “imaginative.” I find issue with the fact that so many people have a problem with imagination. In my memory the most memorable attack on a fantasy book was and is all the issues people seem to have with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Witches, Wizards, Muggles, Dragons, Qudditch, what is wrong with the world that children would want to imagine they had magical powers?? The answer is nothing, but plenty of people found fault with the ideas fearing that the children and adolescents reading the books would grab the nearest broom and pretend they could cast a spell of light. (In the interest of full disclosure my father in law is one of the fruit loops people who find fault with these books). Another much attacked book (and movie) is Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass which is the book that I am reading this week. The book was very attacked for being on the opposite end of the religious spectrum as The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.
Science Fiction is also discussed in this chapter. Boys are always drawn to science fiction, and I think the caption with the picture best describes the attraction to the genre, “… boys like science fiction because it provides an opportunity to read romances without feeling the stigma attached to ‘girls’ love stories.” I think this is a perfect description of this genre; Star Wars of course comes to mind, even though that really isn’t literature. War of the Worlds is mentioned in this chapter, as well as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both of these books deal with space travel, aliens and other fantastic ideas, even though the delivery is very different – one does so in a dark way, the other is very lighthearted and humorous.
Several of the books that I have read for this class this summer have been utopian/dystopian based books. Those stories of societies that are intended to be better than what we have currently, but are often worse than our worst nightmares. Usually the stories are classic hero stories, of those that rebel against the system in favor of something better than the complete control of some self righteous group of “elders” or “committees.” These books, as mentioned in this chapter, are generally scary books for adults serving as reminders of potential things to come, but for adolescents they often serve as reminders to be thankful for the freedoms that we have. The Giver is a great example of this, as well as The Hunger Games, and Uglies. All three of those books have been based around societies that have been utopian on the surface, but dystopian in reality.
All of these specific types of genres are important to us as future English teachers because of their pure attraction to young adults. They are often heroic stories where the protagonist has to overcome something great in order to gain wisdom and sometimes save damsels’ in distress. They hold stories that young adults can lose themselves in and lets them exercise their imagination in ways that do not involve playing pretend in the backyard.
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