“Yer a Wizard”: How Fantasy Fiction Facilitates Playing with Emotions and Reinforces Magical Thinking

Abstract

In this paper, the author argues that fantasy literature serves as a cognitive playground that helps us practise and reaffirm our magical-thinking intuitions. He demonstrates how, just as in magical practices, magic in fantasy fiction becomes a tool for overcoming difficulties and restoring a sense of balance, security, and control. He contends that supernatural agents can be seen as emotional correlatives, giving faces and voices to emotional states and describing a phenomenon from the perspective of how it feels, rather than from a rational viewpoint. This opens up a possibility to articulate those aspects of our emotional lives that are difficult to express in terms of mimetic representation. He posits that, through distancing, fantasy fiction creates a safe environment for engaging with such emotional states, in which magic restores our intuition that no matter how dark our situation appears, we have an inner capacity to overcome it. The main example that is used in the paper is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.