The Age of Commodified Fantasticism:Reflections of Children's Literature and the Fantastic Jack Zipes (bio) New York, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin-in all the trend-setting centers of fashion in the western world and in all the numerous auxiliaries of the culture industry, one can hardly walk down a street or into a building without being smacked in the eye with some artifact stamped as "fantastic." There are outlandish dresses, suits, and all sorts of apparel shaped with fantastic élan; exotic, stream-lined furniture with fantastic curves and forms to complement your body; startling calendars, posters, paintings, and cards dashed with fantastic designs to enhance your search for novelty; throbbing music composed to send you on a fantastic trip; lurid and unimaginable book covers inviting the imagination to speculate about the fantastic stories between the covers; sensational photographs and marquees promising films to outfantasize your own fantasy; breath-taking and bizarre advertisements drawn to lure and announce fantastic bargains; fabulous beauty shops and cosmetics created to do a fantastic job for your image; computer games challenging you to undertake a fantastic trip and to conquer and destroy extraordinary creatures; sex businesses which encourage men to pay money to hear sugar-voice women indulge their wildest fantasies over the phone. Obviously we are living in the age of fantasia. Having outstripped surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, modernism, and postmodernism, as well as fascism, socialism, communism, and democratic parliamentarianism, we fully-grown products of the twentieth century are now ready for the full treatment of commodified fantasticism. What does all this mean, this craving to be a "fantastic" person, part of the scene, this yearning for a fantastic experience, this compelling desire to buy and consequently become identified with a fantastic artefact? Is this fantasticism a sign of flight from the overly banal, rationalized order of our everyday experience? Is it a sign of conformity with commodity production, which has manipulated our sensibilities and sensuality to the point that our characteristic urges merely represent caricatures of our real needs? Or is the fantasticism of our lives a passing phase of protest against standardization and conformity, indicating that human subjectivity cannot be fully manipulated by the culture industry? Or, perhaps, those fantastic images produced by the culture industry for profit are dependent both on our unfulfilled needs and frustrations and on our positive Utopian quest to accentuate and develop the unique potential we each possess as individuals? Ultimately, these questions can be reduced to a simple one: how do we deal with the commodified fantasticism which inundates our lives both in the private and public spheres? For a literary critic and teacher of literature, like myself this question gives rise to a series of more specific questions: What does the wave of the fantastic in literature indicate? What is the fantastic in literature? How can I situate it and teach it? What bearing does it have on my profession and work? In 1978, as fantasy literature was booming and the field dealing with the fantastic in literature was rapidly expanding, I ordered a special issue of The CEA Critic edited by Donald E. Morse entitled "Fantasy," hoping that I might find my bearings as I worked in the realm of fantastic criticism. I was greatly disappointed. The journal is divided into three sections: teaching, topics and authors, bibliographies. By far the most useful is the last, which consist of an annotated bibliography of fantasy fiction by Roger G. Schoblin and an annotated bibliography of fantasy fiction by Roger G. Schoblin and an annotated bibliography of critical studies and reference works on fantasy by Marshall B. Tymm. The essays in the other two sections are a sad comment on the state of college English teachers in the USA, if they are at all representative of those teaching fantasy courses in the groves of academe. There is one major argument running through most the essays: fantasy is good for the health of students, since it presents well-ordered worlds which help them order the chaotic and conflicting experiences accompanying maturation; thus, let us teach more and more of these courses. In addition, Jane Mobley argues: "I believe fantasy is an important literary study, and if traditional...