Monday, August 26, 2013

thoughts on escapism

This is the last week of summer and I am starting training at a new job while still working my old job and about to go away for my cousin's wedding, SO! before Jane gets lost in the shuffle I want to put out an unfinished post I had stewing around.





I've been thinking a lot about escapism since I started reading Austen. Deresiewicz writes about how non-escapist Austen was in her own writing. She didn't write Gothic romance, though she appreciated that genre: she wrote about women's lives as they were for ladies in small English countries. With her narrow focus, rooted in a context she knew intimately, she revealed universal human truths. People weren't running around Europe, getting locked up in ruined castles. They were talking with their neighbors, falling in love, and going to dances.

But even if her novels were anti-escapist for her time, they are escapes for me now. I don't have a grasp of where my place in the world is, and a world where men of a certain status had the choice of lawyer, clergy, soldier, or sailor seems kinda nice. Her life was so different from mine that I want to escape into her novels, and I don't think this is uncommon. This new movie Austenland seems to tap into that, though I haven't seen it; modern day women go to a Jane Austen theme park to dress up and hope to find their own happy ending. And her novels were escapes for men in the trenches during WWI.

Which would lead me to...
Rudyard Kipling...Science Fiction, romance, pulp/trash...criticism against escapism sort of lame, and I don't mean "escapist" in a negative way. I recognize my reality in Austen reality, but the customs are so different...What does it mean, this word "escapist"? A blogger on romance fiction says: "I’ve always pushed back against the idea that romance is escapist in a “special” way. But that’s probably because of the way I define the word. For me, romance is no more (or less) escapist than many other activities I engage in. We act as if we all know what we mean when we invoke the term, but I’m not sure we’re defining it the same way. I would define it, in this discussion, as a cognitive activity that takes my mind to a different place from its everyday life and provides different types of stimulation, comfort, and/or cognitive stretching. Using that definition, music is an escape (both listening and playing). My scholarly research can be an escape from the modern world."

Escaping into fiction: healthier than drugs or alcohol, but not as easy.





I never got around to finishing that post, once I realized what a loaded term "escapist" was.

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