Graduation Year

2015

Date of Submission

4-2015

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Literature

Reader 1

Christine Crockett

Reader 2

Kevin Moffett

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2015 Elizabeth Chapin

Abstract

In making a distinction between secondary and fractured worlds, we can begin to determine the possibilities that fantasy literature, as a wider subject, holds for female characters and for feminine themes. These two areas of fantasy represent very different possibilities for women and the feminine, as a result of their approaches towards the presentation of ideology and authority. These approaches find their root most clearly in the creation of a story’s place and time, a fact I will explore through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope.” For, though both high fantasy and the fantastic question the real, representing, as Rosemary Jackson writes, a “dissatisfaction with what ‘is,’” they undermine the structure of that reality to very different degrees, with one mode seeking out a stabilizing transcendence, while the other revels in an ambiguous immanence. The creative response to this critical exploration will both imaginatively reflect on and practically test the initial questions posed and arguments made, in an effort to more personally understand how each tradition does or does not make room for women and the feminine.

Comments

  • 2015 CMC Best Thesis Award – Literature

Download

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

Share

COinS