Exploring Perception and Reality in Narrative

Welcome back to The Literary Life Podcast and the second episode of our series on George MacDonald's Phantastes, covering chapters 5-9. Angelina and Thomas kick off the book chat sharing some thoughts on the Duessa-type character in this section. Cindy mentions the connection she made to James Russell Lowell's poem, "The Vision of Sir Launfal." They go on to discuss the parallels between this section and the Pygmalion myth. Other mythological references abound throughout the story, as we will see. Our hosts go deep exploring the themes of deception, the fall, doppelgangers and spiritual death in these chapters.

Don’t forget to check out the Advent and Christmas resources our hosts have ready for your holiday season. As mentioned before, Cindy’s new edition of Hallelujah: Cultivating Advent Traditions with Handel’s Messiah is available now, and she has a live celebration even happening on November 19, 2020. Check our CindyRollins.net for more information. Also, Thomas and Angelina have a sale going on for an Advent Bundle of their popular webinars, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and The Poetry of Advent. Additionally, Kelly Cumbee will be teaching a webinar series called “Seeking the Discarded Image: Nature.”

Be back next week when we will cover chapters 10-14. Remember to join the discussion in our Literary Life Discussion Group.

Commonplace Quotes:

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

School isn’t supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

Richard Louv

Milton’s point in Paradise Lost is that free man can be instructed only by the non-compulsive forms, whether vision, parable, or drama. Hence Paradise Lost is a series of interlocking visions, Adam warned by the cathartic contrapuntal vision of satanic fall, and fall through vision of Eve. To fall is to choose an illusion, not a wrong reason.

Northrup Frye When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be

by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be     Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,  Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,     Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;  When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,     Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,  And think that I may never live to trace     Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;  And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,     That I shall never look upon thee more,  Never have relish in the faery power     Of unreflecting love—then on the shore  Of the wide world I stand alone, and think  Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Book List:

(Amazon affiliate links)

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv

Notebooks on Renaissance Literature by Northrup Frye

The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol

Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouquée

Faust (Parts One and Two) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

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