joanna bujes wrote:
>
> I know what you mean, but Genesis, Book of Job, etc., seem to have a
> similar heft....
Genre distinctions are important here. The content of Job, _Odyssey_, _Bleak House_ and _Lord of the Ring_ may consist of narrated events that did not "really" happen, but only the last can usefully be considered fantasy, the generic radical of which is shared agreement between story-teller and reader that the events narrated not only did not occur but occurred in a world that could not exist. Job asserts its reality on both a narrative and a theological basis, the Odyssey is a story the audience already knows "really" happened (and it is told by the Muse to the poet, with the audience listening in, and _Bleak House_ is presented as a fiction but consistent with the 'real world." Dickens even adds a note affirming that spontaneous combustion _could_ happen. But in the Ring trilogy part of the very substance is the shared knowledge of writer and reader that this is an imaginary world not merely a fictional world. I suppose "magical realism" is yet another genre of fiction, but I don't know much about it.
Carrol
> Max B. Sawicky wrote:
>
> >There is no such thing as Judeo-Christian ideology.
> >That would be like Cat-Mouse Ideology.
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