Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement

DONALD E. MORSE THE END OF THE WORLD IN AMERICAN HISTORY AND FANTASY: THE TRUMPET OF THE LAST JUDGMENT Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,

—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "SelfReliance" The fantastic exists in a symbiotic relation with consensus reality.

1 Yet while we acknowledge that one person's fantasy is another's reality, we often neglect to affirm that one era's reality is another's fantasy. George Landow reminds us that "fantasy and our conception of what is fantastic depend upon our view of reality: what we find improbable and unexpected follows from what we find probable and likely, the fantastic will therefore necessarily vary with the individual and the age

" (107 emphasis added). The events of 11 September 2001, for example, once considered the stuff of fantastic novels suddenly became reality in all their appalling detail. Similarly, as I write, the number one book on The New York Times Best Seller list is a fantastic work, Desecration by Tim LaHayne and Jerry B. Jenkins

— 1 There are many definitions of the fantastic, hut most rely on a contrast between our notions of how and where reality relates to the fantastic. Kathryn Hume, for instance, describes the fantastic as "the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal" (xii) and goes on to define "Fantasy as any departure from consensus reality

" (21). 219