Set Of Fantasies Research Articles

The implications of the Madonna/Whore Constellation: A common fantasy underlying misogyny?

AbstractThe Madonna/Whore Constellation of fantasies often underlies well‐recognized and pervasive misogynistic attitudes in our culture. These common and disturbing ideas about women serve to validate continued societal acceptance of the degradation of those people who are identified as female. The author suggests that there is a dynamic connection between the often‐unconscious Madonna/Whore complex of fantasies and consciously recognized misogyny. The author suggests that this set of fantasies is driven, in part, by overwhelming (i.e., traumatic) annihilation anxiety. It is argued in this paper that men who have felt overstimulated by women both emotionally and sexually as they develop are likely to feel helpless, anxious, and powerless in relation to women as adults. To defend against these feelings, some men wish for omnipotent control and place women into the binary, dichotomous categories of Madonna or Whore. These fantasies serve to solidify masculine identity and a male sense of superiority. The author proposes that the prevailing norms in our culture that reflect male supremacy not only reflect shared patriarchal beliefs but also function to justify these particularly dangerous hateful beliefs ‐ as if they were appropriate and even necessary to maintaining superior male status.

Azeem and the Witch: Race, Disability, and Medievalisms in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the second highest-grossing movie of 1991. Its fuzzy version of the Middle Ages invokes the Angevins only in cameo and revises a genre of medievalism I call ‘Robin Hood Times’. This medievalism claims a specific setting, usually during the reign of King Richard I, even while it generalizes that setting enough to comment on contemporary problems. In Prince of Thieves, the characters Azeem and Mortianna serve as opposites, their racialized bodies participating in an individualized discourse about race that ultimately upholds a neoliberal, ‘colorblind’ form of white supremacy. Azeem’s physical competence and ability also contrast sharply with Mortianna’s physical frailty and deformity in a classic example of what Mitchell and Snyder (2000) call ‘narrative prosthesis.’ The intersections of race and disability in the fantasy setting of Robin Hood Times suggest that the solution to social injustice is individual rather than systemic. The return of the ‘good’ King Richard I restores order, virtue, the Locksley lands—and the status quo. The Robin Hood story has revolutionary potential, but this version of Robin Hood Times chooses to reinforce neoliberal ableism and ‘colorblind’ racial tolerance instead of the utopian promises of equity that the forest society could provide.

Fantasie nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price, by Samantha Ege

<i>Fantasie nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price</i>, by Samantha Ege

The mediating effect of fantasy on engagement in an AR game for learning

It is challenging to create an immersive and engaging remote education setting properly, especially for children who are less motivated and quickly distracted by virtual learning activities that fall short of leveraging the immersive design potential. To maximize the educational potential of AR game-based learning, designers need to align fantastical environments, learning content, and AR requirements. This task requires a thorough understanding of the impact of design choices on users’ experiences. To gain insights into the motivational mechanics of fantasy elements in AR, we investigated the effect of two AR learning contexts—a fantasy setting and a daily setting—on children’s experience and motivation. Our goal is to scrutinize the relationship between fantasy states, intrinsic motivation, and players’ experience of autonomy and presence. Our results suggest that the relationship between imagination and enjoyment—stimulated by our two conditions—is fully mediated by experiences of autonomy and presence. Our research provides insights into the relationships between experience constructs and informs the design of fantasy learning experiences. We provide guidelines to support game designers and researchers to integrate the fantasy experience in AR learning games for children.

Scoring Alien Worlds: World Music Mashups in 21st Century Sci-Fi and Fantasy TV, Film and Video Games

This article provides three case studies of the use of world music resources to build alien worlds in mainstream screen media with Sci-Fi or Fantasy settings. The case studies—the TV series Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, the film Avatar and the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) video game World of Warcraft—show how composers and associated music professionals in the early twenty-first century increasingly draw on such sonic materials to generate a rich sense of sonic otherness and note the means they employ to sidestep such music’s existing geographical and cultural references. Each case study explores a contrasting subject position—composer, music consultant and consumer—to better trace not only the creation of such soundtracks but also what senses disparate groups of ordinary listeners subsequently make of them. The examples suggest that outside the sphere of big-budget cinema there is a growing confidence in both the creation and reception of such sonic projections, and that, when sufficiently attracted by what they hear, listeners may actively seek out ways to follow-up on the expressive characterisations put forward in such soundtracks. Three broad types of mashup are uncovered, those that work with world music ingredients by insinuation, integration and creolisation.

Students’ Perceptions of an In-house Developed Multiplayer Online Role-playing Serious Game for Learning of 21st Century Skills – a Cross Sectional Study

<strong>Background:</strong> An in-house serious game was developed to train pharmacy students in 21^st century skills. Players work collaboratively in a “choose-your-own-adventure” format to find a cure for humankind in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world infested by zombies. Our objectives were to determine if the game would enhance student learning of 21^st century skills in an engaging way, and whether the game could replace or supplement traditional teaching methods in the pharmacy professional skills training curriculum. <strong>Methods: </strong>A self-administered questionnaire obtained information about participants’ demographics, gaming interests, frequency, experiences and preferences; the game’s role in learning 21^st century skills and its role in the curriculum. A pre- and post-quiz was conducted to test on participants’ pharmacy knowledge. Descriptive statistics, Friedman two-way ANOVA, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and Mann-Whitney U test were used for analysis. <strong>Results:</strong> Participants preferred the three-dimensional first-person view, modern fantasy setting, authentic hero-adventure storyline, and the collaborative nature of gameplay. Majority felt that the game trained them on performing pharmaceutical calculations (27/30, 90.0%), patient history-taking and recommending appropriate medications (24/30, 80.0% each). Participants indicated that they learnt more about patient counselling (mean rank = 3.95) compared to the other 21^st century skills, such as patient history-taking (mean rank = 3.02, <em>p</em> = 0.002), applying drug information from monographs (mean rank = 2.95, <em>p</em> = 0.003), pharmacotherapy of drugs (mean rank = 2.37, <em>p</em> &lt; 0.001), and extemporaneous preparation skills (mean rank = 2.72, <em>p</em> = 0.001). Majority agreed that the game should not replace traditional methods of teaching in the curriculum (≥60.0%), but should supplement face-to-face counselling sessions (90.0%), extemporaneous/compounding labs (73.3%) and lectures (60.0%). <strong>Conclusion: </strong>Pharmacy students perceive that our game is able to train on 21^st century skills, such as health communication (patient history taking and counselling) and performing pharmaceutical calculations. With appropriate implementation, this game has the potential to become a useful supplementary teaching tool to help enhance the learning achieved by pharmacy students.

“We Offer Nuffle a Sausage Sacrifice on Game Day”. Blood Bowl Players’ World-building Rituals through the Lens of Theory of Sociocultual Viability

This article explores the world-building activities of players of the tabletop game Blood Bowl—a game that parodies American Football within a fantasy setting. It utilizes a ritual framework to focus on players’ activities relating to the considerable amount of luck inherent to the game. Based on fieldwork and survey data, it interprets players’ rituals and other actions as an effort to enact a particular social space, a “magic circle,” where enjoyable risk-taking and “edgework” take place. This social space is then analyzed within the Mary Douglas-derived theory of sociocultural viability (cultural theory). Using the theory’s typology, Blood Bowl tournaments can be characterized as individualist–hierarchy hybrid institutions. The article contributes by offering cultural theory as a tool for analyzing and comparing risk-taking behavior in diverse social contexts. The worlds built through Blood Bowl play are both analyzable and comparable with those integral to other social institutions, with cultural theory’s social solidarities ubiquitous. The article thus innovates by linking literatures on leisure and gaming with broader social theory.

Editors’ Letter

Editors’ Letter

Interpreting Anime by Christopher Bolton, and: The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media by Thomas Lamarre

Reviewed by: Interpreting Anime by Christopher Bolton, and: The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media by Thomas Lamarre Deborah Shamoon Interpreting Anime. By Christopher Bolton. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 328 pages. Hardcover, $96.00; softcover, $24.00. The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. By Thomas Lamarre. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 448 pages. Hardcover, $108.00; softcover, $27.00. Anime studies has emerged as a discrete field of inquiry in the last twenty years, with the publication of theoretically informed scholarship first in Japanese, then in English. The first to push the study of anime and its fandom in a more theoretical direction was Azuma Hiroki in 2001, in a monograph (later published in English) that expanded on Ōtsuka Eiji's theory of narrative consumption from the 1980s. English-language study of anime has also steadily evolved from fan oriented to theoretically informed. The first book-length academic study of anime in English, by Susan Napier, appeared in 2001, followed by the founding of the Mechademia journal in 2006. At first intended to be a bridge between fans and scholars, Mechademia has since moved in a more decidedly academic direction. In The Anime Machine (2009) Thomas Lamarre explored the relationship between form and content in limited animation, bringing formal analysis to the English-language discourse on anime, which had tended to focus only on theme and plot. Anime's Media Mix (2012), by Marc Steinberg, elaborated on the work of Ōtsuka and Azuma in theorizing anime franchises and cross-platform marketing.1 The publication of the two new books under review here, one by Lamarre and the other by Christopher Bolton, suggest still newer directions in anime studies. Bolton's Interpreting Anime contains seven chapters, each covering thematic readings of film and television anime as informed by film theory. Bolton offers several strategies for closely reading anime by examining visual and narrative structure as well as context. He states of his goal, "looking at a range of films and critical work is not just an end in itself but a way to help readers of this book develop their own original ways of reading and interpreting anime, in order to make these works even more interesting, compelling, and relevant for individual viewers" (p. 17). Bolton's selection includes several canonical films, with chapters on Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Millennium Actress (2001), and Howl's Moving Castle (2004), respectively. His comparison of the anime and manga versions of Akira, both by Ōtomo Katsuhiro, yields an interesting formal analysis of the narrative capacities of the two media. Bolton writes that "anime's visual language or grammar is effective for expressing confusion but not as good for portraying solutions or resolutions. In other words, I will argue that the anime is inconclusive not because Ōtomo could not think of a solution but because he could not animate it" (p. 47). That is, in the manga the ending evokes a clearer political, revolutionary message through the use of perspective [End Page 165] and Ōtomo's meticulous draftsmanship, while the abstract flashing lights at the end of the anime are necessarily more ambiguous. Bolton also suggests a new way of reading the cyborgs of Ghost in the Shell in terms of puppets, and particularly the bunraku puppets of the Edo period. He draws a parallel between the human-like cyborg body of Major Kusanagi and the elaborate puppets of bunraku, which not only share an uncanny realism but also function within genres—anime and bunraku—that offer similar portrayals of embodiment, gender, and violence. He writes, "The major, like the puppets, oscillates between being more and less present than flesh. The result is that the violence is more and less real; … it is both multiplied and displaced" (p. 121). Likewise, Bolton's comparison of Howl's Moving Castle with the source novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones presents a new way of thinking about Miyazaki Hayao's films. Although it shares many features of Miyazaki's other films (girl protagonist, antiwar message, preindustrial fantasy setting, flying sequences), Howl was not one of Studio Ghibli's biggest hits, and because of the...

THE ROLE OF PERSONAL NAMES IN CREATING STEREOTYPICAL ELECTRONIC GAME CHARACTERS

Over the recent years, electronic games gradually gained strong influence on the psychological development of people, especially the younger generation, and the trend is currently gaining further momentum. They have been little studied, even less so by linguists, which makes the object of the study, linguistic peculiarities of electronic games, highly topical. The subject of this research is the role of personal names that nominate characters in electronic games. Due to the large amounts of information an ordinary human being has to process every moment in life, our mind tends to search for patterns and stereotypes everywhere, including literature, movies, and electronic games. Two types of character classification types were singled out: archetypical and stereotypical. The main types of characters in fantasy setting electronic games (using Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt as the source of material) according to both were enumerated. Afterwards, the peculiarities of nomination of each type was analyzed.

The Castration Complex

ABSTRACTTheoretical formulations of the castration complex have changed as psychoanalytic theory has developed. The author briefly reviews the literature and asserts that analyzing the set of fantasies related to potential or imagined castration continues to be clinically quite important. Understanding these unconscious fantasies provides a window into the individual's experience of his or her body in relation to those of important others throughout development. A case is provided to illustrate this, and to discuss the ways in which several different ways of thinking about castration fantasies contributed something essential to this analysis.

On the Origins and Sources of the Child Catcher: Ken Hughes' Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the Roald Dahl Connection

On the Origins and Sources of the Child Catcher:Ken Hughes' Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the Roald Dahl Connection Adrian Schober (bio) Something is definitely rotten in the tyrannical state of Vulgaria. Innocent children are being rounded up, locked in cages and sent away, never to be seen and heard of again – all because the wicked, conceited Baroness Bomburst (Anna Quayle) hates children. Ironically, the tantrum-prone Baron (Gert Fröbe) is essentially a child himself, in an arrested state of development. Together they rule the land through terror and intimidation, whereby an irrational hatred of children seems to unite Vulgaria's ruling class in a common cause against a common enemy. Here, the ruthless Child Catcher (Robert Helpmann) is always on call to carry out the Baroness' wishes. The more fortunate children who have managed to escape his evil clutches hide away in the caverns underneath the Baron's schloss, living and scavenging like rats, waiting for someone to liberate them. And so, when crackpot Edwardian inventor Caractacus Potts (Dick Van Dyke), beautiful socialite Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes) and the motherless Potts twins, Jeremy and Jemima (Adrian Hall and Heather Ripley, respectively), find themselves here, they are strangers in a strange land. Caractacus struggles to make sense of this lunacy: "What kind of country is this? No children. Everybody terrified out of their lives?" From this brief description of the 1968 British musical/satirical comedy/fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, directed by Ken Hughes and drawing on Ian Fleming's adventures of the extraordinary, all-purpose vehicle, which features in the title, Vulgaria has all the hallmarks of a police state: a curious amalgam of the German Empire and Nazi Germany, where absolute monarchy meets noticeably modern forms of fascism and despotism. But, while the film appropriates elements we readily identify with Fleming (most notably, foreign spies and megalomaniacal despots), the film's [End Page 361] digression into fantasy set in Vulgaria, which spotlights the figure of the Child Catcher, do not appear in Fleming's stories of the same name (published between 1964 and 1965 and brought together in one volume in 1968). Indeed, the film is only tangentially related to Fleming. When producer Albert R. Broccoli purchased the rights to Fleming's work, this included not only his most celebrated creation, James Bond, but this lesser-known children's property. Conceived by its producer as "Britain's answer to Disney's Mary Poppins [1964]" (Maxford 44), Broccoli reemployed much of the talent for that film, including Dick Van Dyke and award-winning songwriters Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, among others. He also re-utilized much of his Bond entourage. This included Roald Dahl, who had been commissioned to write the screenplay for You Only Live Twice (1967). Prima facie, Fleming and Dahl seemed the perfect marriage of talents. By the time Dahl was commissioned to write the screenplay for Chitty Chitty, he already had James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and The Magic Finger (1966) on his resume. As for British director Hughes, his previous credits included crime thrillers and dramas, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) and Casino Royale (1967). Hughes was also a writer in his own right on many of his films and he supplied Dahl with the basic storyline of Chitty Chitty—or so he alleges (Treglown 183). According to Hughes, Dahl "'Helped out a bit with the story but didn't seem to get into it. It was Cubby's [Broccoli's] idea that I went off to write the script alone because Roald was so very slow. But a very nice man" (Maxford 45). Despite sharing screenwriting credit with Dahl he insists: There was nothing about the Baron and the Baroness and the children in the cellars. … That was all Grimm's fairy-tale stuff which I think it needed. The Childcatcher was also my invention—his cage and everything—because in something like that you need a wicked witch or an evil queen. So I got to thinking what sinister thing can we have to frighten the shit out of all the kids, and it was a Childcatcher! (Maxford 45...

Grotesque Realism in O.V Vijayan’s The Saga of Dharmapuri

The Saga of Dharmapuri by O.V. Vijayan is a dystopian fantasy set in the imaginary country of Dharmapuri, which could be a depiction of India or any other newly independent country in the post-colonial era. Mikhail Bakhtin in his treatise Rabelais and his World (1965) justifies the use of Grotesque Realism, a literary trope that allows the author to move away from the conventions of propriety and decency to convey messages that are real and powerful nevertheless. Usually exaggeration and hyperbole are key elements of this style. Through the centuries, literature has often been a medium through which contemporary concerns have been transmitted. This paper argues that O.V. Vijayan uses Grotesque Realism in his novel to depict the political, social and economic condition of India of the 1970s- specifically a country that was under emergency. Like all dystopian fables, The Saga of Dharmapuri has been prophetic in anticipating some of the social issues that we face even today. The paper aims at examining how Vijayan uses explicit language and scatological and sexual imagery so as to achieve this sense of realism within his novel.

Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff

Reviewed by: Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff April Spisak Turtschaninoff, Maria Maresi; tr. by A.A. Prime. Amulet, 2017 [256p] (Red Abbey Chronicles) Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-2269-1 $17.95 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-6131-2974-6 $15.54 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 In this Finnish import, Maresi is one of the lucky girls at the Red Abbey because she comes from a family that loved her and sent her away to become a novice so she could have a better life. She is absorbing knowledge from the Sisters that she can eventually bring back to her village to help it, and she lives a work-filled but happy life, until it all threatens to come crashing down when a vengeful man intent on recapturing (and eventually killing) his daughter invades the protected island that houses the Abbey. Jai, the man’s daughter, had already told Maresi and her fellow nuns about her abusive family, so the Mother is prepared, enacting ancient rituals of Maiden, Mother, and Crone with the other Sisters to protect their home. While there is clearly an emphasis on feminism and female empowerment at the Abbey, it is within a larger societal structure that is built around, at least in some regions, stunning misogyny. Therefore the feminist acts are so constrained, so shaped around evil, that they read more as sacrificial rather than powerful. The fact that Maresi, our narrator, finds strength in isolation is contextually believable, however, and the genuine love between all of these women is life-sustaining and transformative. Readers seeking a fresh, unusual fantasy setting and voice will likely appreciate this haunting literary detour. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Song of the Current by Sarah Tolcser

Reviewed by: Song of the Current by Sarah Tolcser Sarah Sahn Tolcser, Sarah Song of the Current. Bloomsbury, 2017 [352p] ISBN 978-1-68119-297-0 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 When her father is arrested for smuggling, seventeen-year-old Caroline Oresteia must take the tiller of her family's wherry to deliver a mysterious cargo in return for her father's freedom. Caro opens the forbidden crate and awakens a boy in an enchanted sleep, who claims to work for the recently murdered Emparch of Akhaia; though she figures out quickly that he's lying about his identity, she doesn't guess that he is in fact Markos Andela, the only surviving son of the Emparch. The two take an immediate dislike to each other, and their transition from mutual hostility to respect and eventually to romance is predictable but handled with care and humor; Caro doesn't lose any of her competence or confidence in their relationship. Caro's distinctive, engaging voice plunges readers into the action and doesn't let up as the two flee privateers, spies, and a traitorous royal shadowman. The Mediterranean and North African–inspired setting is a refreshing change from more typical fantasy settings, and Kristin Cashore's heroines (Graceling, BCCB 1/09, etc.) find a worthy sister in Caro; readers will eagerly await her further adventures in the hinted-at sequel. Copyright © 2017 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

WORD FORMATION ON DRAGON NEST CHAT LANGUAGE

Word formation is creation of new words, which sometimes changes a word’s meaning. Words can be formed from multi word phrases as well. In many cases vocabularies in language are formed from combination of words (Haspelmath 2010: 102). Word formation does not only involve changing physical form of the word itself, but also changing the meaning of said word. There are also instances where the physical form retain its original form while the meaning changes. The phenomenon is called semantic change (Stockwell-Minkova 2001:149). In this thesis the research proposed that the said phenomenon occur in virtual environment, such as in MMORPG. Multiplayer online games that feature fantasy setting virtual environment. For the purpose of this research, Dragon Nest South East Asia server was chosen as data source. The samples are taken from players perusing [World] communication channel. The result of the data analysis has shown that the phenomenon of word formation could occur in a virtual environment of MMORPG, specifcally in Dragon Nest SEA. There are two word formation processes found: processes that involve physical changes and processes that do not involve physical changes but rather innate meaning. It is done by both processing daily language vocabulary both physically and changing its innate meaning to create new words that suits the said virtual environment context. This fnding may influence future research on a fresh perspective and untilled feld.

Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization

Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization Dorothy Berry and Megan MacDonald In 2014, the Black Film Center/Archive received support from the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant program of the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct the Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization project. This estimated two-year, three-pronged endeavor aims to reintegrate the dispersed papers of pioneering race film producer and distributor Richard E. Norman, produce and publish a comprehensive new finding aid to the collection, and digitize thousands of unique documents and other items in the collection for free public access online. The Norman Collection represents one of the greatest caches of material relating to the burgeoning study of early African American moviegoing culture and race films. Consisting of forty linear feet of historical materials, ranging from personal and business correspondence to censorship reports to production documentation to promotional posters, the Norman Collection provides a corpus for scholars seeking to explore the industry of independently produced, African American–themed films starring Black casts and exhibited to Black audiences that thrived from the late 1910s through the mid-1950s. In the 1910s, Norman, who had previously been working in niche “Home Talent” movies, became aware of independent, underground race films being screened at Black-operated theaters throughout the segregated South and Midwest. Though he was white, he turned to race films as his principal business enterprise and produced a series of successful all-Black feature films including The Green-Eyed Monster (1919), The Bull-Dogger (1921), The Crimson Skull (1922), and The Flying Ace (1926). The films highlighted African American action and romance in—at the time—almost fantasy settings. The Flying Ace, for example, followed the adventures of one Captain [End Page 253] Billy Stokes, an African American pilot in the US armed forces, a career that was entirely inaccessible to Black men until 1940. Norman was a meticulous record keeper in both his professional and personal life and the collection he left behind is remarkable as a near-complete record of the Norman Film Manufacturing Company, benefiting researchers of Norman specifically as well as historians of social migration, itinerant filmmaking, and the silent era race films. Beyond Norman’s substantial achievements, his well-documented relationships with the many performers, filmmakers, studios, and theater operators connected to the race circuit make this one of the most significant collections of a scarcely documented culture. In the July 2014 grant proposal to the NEH, highlighting support for the Norman Collection digitization and reprocessing project, film historian Matthew H. Bernstein writes, “It is impossible to overstate the importance of Norman’s papers.” Bernstein explains its value not only to film history, but to understanding “a distinct strain of black popular culture in the 20th century.” He continues, “Beyond the realm of race filmmaking, the Norman papers are the most illuminating archival resource in existence for reconstructing black film culture.” Megan MacDonald, the Richard E. Norman project archivist, has worked with African diasporic collections at Indiana University for nine years. Before joining the Black Film Center/Archive staff in 2015, she was an archivist for IU’s Liberian Collection working with one of the largest collections of Liberian materials in the United States. As part of this NEH-funded processing project, MacDonald has coordinated the reintegration of the Norman Collection, which had been distributed across two campus repositories following its donation by Norman’s son, Captain Richard Norman, in the 1980s. In this conversation from March 2016, MacDonald discusses the complications and discoveries that accompany a large scale archival access project. Dorothy Berry: Can you tell me your position at the Black Film Center/Archive? Megan MacDonald: Yes, I am the project archivist and processing archivist for the Richard E. Norman Collection. DB: Can you give a little background on what that collection entails? MM: Yes, he [Norman] was a filmmaker in the 1920s, late 1910s, making at first . . . itinerant movies, where he would take the same movie plot and go around from city to city and film it with a new cast, a local cast, and then play it there for the townspeople to see. Then he got into race films, which...

Review

Reviewed by: Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings by Stefan Ekman Christy Williams (bio) Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings. By Stefan Ekman. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. 284pp. Here Be Dragons is an exceptional study of fantasy literature that pays critical attention to fantasy landscapes and argues that setting-based readings, which Stefan Ekman terms topofocal readings, offer a rich, unexplored area of critical investigation. Ekman’s study is well grounded in fantasy scholarship, and he demonstrates that although setting has been the focus of several studies, it is still an understudied area that typically emphasizes the connections of setting to character and plot rather than focusing on setting as the primary [End Page 133] point of interest. Ekman argues that settings deserve equal critical attention and that fantasy settings in particular are important because of “fantasy’s characteristic ability to create, within its fictive worlds, new rules for how things work” (214). Ekman offers four topofocal approaches—maps, borders and boundaries, nature and culture, realms and rulers—which he demonstrates with extensive close readings of several fantasy texts. The book is organized around the four approaches, with a chapter devoted to each, and includes an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix for the methodology of Chapter 2. The individual chapters are meant to be understandable as stand-alone studies, which would make them easy to use in a classroom. The introduction convincingly argues that topofocal readings can illuminate elements of individual texts and fantasy as a genre that are missed in traditional approaches. Ekman’s “What Is Fantasy?” section is noteworthy for its clear and concise synthesis of the most commonly used critical definitions of fantasy as a genre; it would be an excellent selection for undergraduates as an introduction to the genre. Chapter 2 surveys fantasy maps, a ubiquitous feature of the genre. Ekman clarifies that fantasy maps are not maps in the traditional sense because they do not show real places. Rather, in fantasy, “To create the map means, largely, to create the world of the map” (20). Ekman distinguishes between maps that reflect the fantasy world and those that are artifacts of it, which results in two functions: paratext and doceme. He draws on the work of Niels Winfeld Lund to explain that docemes are part of a document or documentation process that can be “isolated” and analyzed (20). Ekman’s focus on reading maps as part of the world-building process reveals a great deal about the fantasy worlds and the worldviews they contain. The chapter surveys a number of fantasy maps and ends with a thorough close reading of the “Part of the Shire” map in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring (1954). Even though Here Be Dragons includes an appendix outlining Ekman’s methodology in this chapter, the chapter itself could use a more detailed explanation how his sampling was randomly chosen. Chapter 3 explores divisions between different areas, offering a compelling explanation of how narration dictates the description of landscape. In this chapter Ekman examines borders and polders that separate mundane and otherworldly domains, and Ekman argues that these boundaries are more about connections than divisions. He examines thresholds in works by Steven Brust, Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Garth Nix, Tolkien, Robert Holdstock, and Terry Pratchett. The discussion of Nix’s Old Kingdom/Abhorsen series does not mention death as a domain, which is an odd omission given the chapter’s earlier examination of borders that divide the lands of the living from those of [End Page 134] the dead. The attention to Faerie as a realm, however, makes this chapter particularly interesting for those working with fairy lore or contemporary fairy tales that include Faerie as a place as well as fairy tales where quests lead characters into other realms. Chapter 4 complicates the nature-culture binary, introducing a continuum that accounts for human control of nature and nature reclaiming human structures. Ekman traces the philosophical debate of whether humans are a part of nature or distinct from it, and he posits that fantasy works are able to construct nature and culture outside this duality because the worlds themselves are constructed...

‘I just don't think I look right in a lot of modern clothes … ’: historically inspired dress as leisure dress

This study examined the motivations and dress practices of individuals who wear what appear to be historical styles of costume or historically inspired dress in settings that do not require wearing them. Qualitative case studies were conducted and analysed using Colaizzi's method of phenomenological analysis [Edward, Karen-Leigh, and Tony Welch. 2011. “The Extension of Colaizzi's Method of Phenomenological Enquiry.” Contemporary Nurse 39 (2): 163–171]. By applying historically inspired dress to Eicher and Miller's [1994. “Dress and the Public, Private, and Secret self: Revisiting a Model.” In Proceedings of the International Textile and Apparel Association, Inc., 145. Minneapolis, MN.] Public, Private, and Secret Self (PPSS) Model, as presented by Miller-Spillman and Lee [2014. “Female Civil War Reenactors’ Dress and Magic Moments.” In Fashion, Design and Events, edited by Kim Williams, Jennifer Laing, and Warwick Frost, 69–83. Abingdon: Routledge], we found that motivations for wearing this type of dress in settings where costume was not required (leisure and reality settings) were similar to those in which costume was required (fantasy settings). Additionally, while some motivations were limited to some settings, some were salient across multiple settings, while others were salient across all settings studied. We also uncovered new motivations, such as feelings of social permission, desiring an ideal body shape or flattering figure, and expressing ideologies and/or world views not previously reported by the model [Miller-Spillman, Kimberly, and Min-Young Lee. 2014. “Female Civil War Reenactors’ Dress and Magic Moments.” In Fashion, Design and Events, edited by Kim Williams, Jennifer Laing, and Warwick Frost, 69–83. Abingdon: Routledge]. This study contributes to understandings of the relationship between dress and leisure because we found that the practice of editing plays an important role in distinguishing leisure dress from fantasy dress, a concept not currently recognized by the PPSS model.

Exploring embodied social presence of youth with Autism in 3D collaborative virtual learning environment: A case study

This case study explores the experience of embodied social presence while learning social competence of 11 youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The learning takes place in a series of 13 Naturalistic Practice (NP) learning activities which are part of a 3D Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment (CVLE)-iSocial. iSocial is a translation of a face-to-face clinic based curriculum, Social Competence Intervention-Adolescents (SCI-A), into a 3D CVLE for delivery over the Internet,. This study developed a direct-observation instrument that built upon the Embodied Social Presence (ESP) theory framework to describe youth with ASDs' embodied presence, embodied copresence and embodied social presence. The findings show that youth with ASD achieved embodied presence and embodied copresence in almost all of the NP activities. However, they achieved embodied social presence in only a handful of NP activities. From comparisons between the learning activities that had high or low percentages of achieving ESP, the results indicate associations of design features (narratives, choosing roles, fantasy settings and ease of use of learning tools) with having a higher percentage of youth achieve embodied social presence. Furthermore, the work of this study provides a method for researchers interested in studying ESP and the results can inform future design decisions in the development 3D CVLE and the structure of learning activities within the 3D CVLE.