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Originally Posted by davem
Because fantasy is actually seriously dangerous literature. 'Serious' literature which depicts 'the real world' only reflects our daily lives back at us & teaches us only that what we see around us is all there is, & all there can be. Its equivalent to replacing all your windows with mirrors.
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If you haven't done that already, you should read the "Asthetic Dimension" (1977) by Herbert Marcuse (a post marxian theorist).
To make the point just two quotes...
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Originally Posted by Herbert Marcuse in "The Aesthetic Dimension"
I shall submit the following thesis: the radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image (schöner schein) of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behaviour while preserving its overwhelming presence. Thereby art creates the realm in which the subversion of experience proper to art becomes possible: the world founded by art is recognised as a reality which is supressed and distorted in the given reality. This experience culminates in extreme situations (of love and death, guilt and failure, but also joy, happiness, and fullfillment) which explode the given reality in the name of a truth normally denied or unheard. The inner logic of the work of art terminates in the emergence of another reason, another sensibility, which defy the rationality and sensibility incorporated in the dominant social institutions.
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Originally Posted by Herbert Marcuse in "The Aesthetic Dimension"
Art reflects this dynamic in its insistence on its own truth, which has its grounds in social reality and is yet its "other". Art breaks open a dimension inaccesible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle. Subjects and objects encounter the appearance of that autonomy which is denied them in their society. The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which no longer, or not yet, is perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
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"all reification is a forgetting". Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance. Forgetting past suffering and past joy alleviates life under a repressive reality principle. In contrast, remembrance spurs the drive for the conquest of suffering and the permanence of joy. But the force of remembrance is frustrated: joy itself is overshadowed by pain. Inexorably so? The horizon of history is still open. If the remebrance of things past would become a motive power in the struggle for changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous historical revolutions.
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Just reflect these words to Tolkien and today...
The question of usefulness raised by davem still remains... and I think it is a good one!
But now I need to sleep a bit.