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Louis Edmond-Hamelin reminds us in his analysis of Canadian northernness and arcticity, the North is a concept produced by a combination of different semantic fields, and is also associated with winterliness, but also alpinity or mountainousness (see Chartier, 2007 : 40–1). However, Maria sees the mountains not as something exotic but rather as something familiar: in the quotation above, ‘Just like home in the Caucasus’. They are still associated with the fantastic – they are eventyrlige , precisely ‘fairy-tale like’ – but, like fairy tales, also
change is a fairy tale.’ 58 The existential threat is more complex than the realisation that a changed climate could make the planet inhospitable, or wholly uninhabitable, for human beings. There is a real risk that we have internalised the idea that we humans are greedy and self-interested. That we are selfish creatures whose future relies on an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher being right about one very crucial axiom of economic thought: that our self-interest serves humanity as a whole. This fiction has
In a town bursting with public art, The Folkestone Mermaid is perhaps the most iconic sculpture of all. Completed by Cornelia Parker for the 2011 Triennial, this life-size bronze cast was famously modelled on Georgina Baker, 38-year-old mother of two, chosen from fifty local applicants. The mermaid sits at the edge of the harbour, atop a boulder, staring out at the sea in all weathers. An obvious homage to the Copenhagen sculpture commissioned in 1909 as a tribute to Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale, the mermaid punctuates the harbour
Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, H.P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, with canonical novels of the fantastic including The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , Bram Stoker's Dracula and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House , to name but a representative few. In contrast to the all-inclusive North American paradigm of the fantastic as an umbrella term for any deviation from realism, with a scope that includes myths, fairy tales, magical realism and science fiction, European theorists such as Pierre
this case are also performative. We make things with words. The democracy of uniting the races until this nefarious concept becomes extinct is a beautiful ideal, but not if it happens through an origin myth that censures the horror, through the fairy-tale that racism does not exist in Brazil, or through the argument (which, while I realise it is well-intentioned, is in my opinion mistaken) that talking about it, denouncing it and applying policies to mitigate its effects are ways to involuntarily produce or strengthen it. This ontological duality loses