I'm very sad that I only got my Maleficent icon right toward the end of my teaching career; it was the perfect icon for posts on that topic, and now I have to find other suitable contexts for using it. :-)
Ditto what kate_nepveu said -- Westerns feature a distinct set of cultural motifs derived from the Old West, which can be (and have been) ported into other contexts. The Dark Tower, for one, varies in how Western it feels, dependent on the usage of those motifs; The Gunslinger and (I think) Wizard and Glass focus heavily on Roland and his society, ergo feel more Western, while The Drawing of the Three is a story that feels more like it's got a Western character wandering around in other stories.
The Dark Tower series is a really interesting example for arguing genre, actually, since the seven books collectively contain everything including the kitchen sink -- science fiction, fantasy, horror, westerns, you name it, those books eat genres for breakfast.
As I said above, I think I quibble with the notion that fantasy is the marked category relative to the unmarked-ness of science fiction -- that absent a bit of magic, it defaults to SF, even if there's no actual science involved. Which is why I want to lump it in with Ruritanian fantasy: it's "fantastical" in the non-mimetic sense, but there's (usually) no magic involved.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 08:33 pm (UTC)Ditto what
The Dark Tower series is a really interesting example for arguing genre, actually, since the seven books collectively contain everything including the kitchen sink -- science fiction, fantasy, horror, westerns, you name it, those books eat genres for breakfast.
As I said above, I think I quibble with the notion that fantasy is the marked category relative to the unmarked-ness of science fiction -- that absent a bit of magic, it defaults to SF, even if there's no actual science involved. Which is why I want to lump it in with Ruritanian fantasy: it's "fantastical" in the non-mimetic sense, but there's (usually) no magic involved.