Fantasy As Screen Memory: Mise-En-Scène of Desire in Alice Munro’s Runaway (Published)
Alice Munro’s character-based short story “Runaway” (2004) mirrors the complexities of the unconscious psyche of the characters, especially the repressed psyche of the female characters as a result of suppression and asocial drives and desires. This paper will show how Alice Munro places fantasy as a setting for her characters where desires are screened through fantasies of the characters where they are planning and creating imaginary scene/s existing between the poles of reality and imagination. This paper will also explain how the whole story is actually the ‘Mise-en-scène’ of desires where the latent aspects of the characters are developed and evolved as a subject through fantasizing the self and other by transgressing the uncertainty and ambiguity of life.
Keywords: Alice Munro, Mise-En-Scène, Runaway, desire, fantasy
Al-Ansari’s Bassma and Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden: The Journey from Reality to Fantasy (Published)
This study aims at drawing a distinction between the world of fantasy and reality in Al-Ansari’s novel Bassma and Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. It investigates how the protagonists in both novels travel from the world of reality which is full of hopelessness, despair, and loss to the world of fantasy full of hope, happiness, and maturity. In other words, the study explores how the world of reality makes both protagonists create an imaginary or mythical world to compensate for what they lost in the world of reality and to entertain the freedom of childhood period. The study methodology is based on the comparative close reading analysis, in which some quotes are selected from both novels to illustrate the protagonists’ journey from reality to fantasy. The study concludes that in the children and young adult literature, most protagonists travel from the world of reality to fantasy in order to become self-actualized, mature, experienced, and to restore the joyful moments of childhood
Keywords: Loneliness, Loss, Reality, childhood, fantasy, garden, past memories, self-actualized