On and Beyond J.R.R. Tolkien and the Fantasy Genre in the Post-Socialist Central Europe
Our Department of English Language and Literature organized an interesting event focusing on fantasy genre in Central Europe.
This workshop (convened and chaired by David Palatinus, and realized within the VEGA project) brought together a team of Czech and Slovak scholars to look current trends in Central European fantasy writing and fantasy studies. The premise of the workshop was that due in part to the success of the film adaptations, Tolkien, and by extension, fantasy has recently been rediscovered as a trending genre paradigm in Western literary and media scholarship. It is perceived as a conduit for underlying cultural ideas about world-building and historical nostalgia, transmediality, fandom and participatory culture as well as media convergence. The fantasy genre has always had a strong tradition in Central Europe as well. Yet, while the fandom is increasing, the scholarly study of Central European fantasy (and Tolkien’s legacy therein) has lagged behind. The workshop aimed to ask questions about what the shifting focus of literary scholarship towards popular genres reveals about forms of cultural import from Anglophone contexts between and across literary fiction and screen media in Czech and Slovak contexts, and offered methodological reflections on the metamorphoses of fantasy across gernes and media that ensure the survival of this peculiar genre and mode.
Given the peculiar circumstances due to the pandemic, the workshop took place ONLINE, via Zoom.