Today, before I add any more words to Cass, I'm doing another revision pass on my thesis preface. One bit that I really like is getting cut, but I didn't want to murder it completely, and it's a pretty stand-alone-y paragraph, so I'm going to share it with you:
During the course of creating the collection, I became more and more interested in the possibilities of the mythology in it. The relationship between the animalistic and magical evokes cultures that believe in the supernatural as a course of fact. A shaman casts a spell and a sick child becomes well. Modern science explains the correlation as a placebo effect, but the child believes in the magic. Either way, the end result is the same. One way or another, the spell worked. I immediately thought of the Anthropology 451 course I took, titled “Culture/Deviance/Psychopathology.” During that course, we discussed Voodoo death, a very real, very extreme example of the effectiveness of a killing curse. Our human relationship with magic is ongoing, even in an era where we cleave to science as the explainer of all things. The genres of magical realism, urban fantasy, high fantasy, and modern fairy tales thrive and seem to say that, even now, science is not enough for us.
3 comments:
Very nice. I like your careful way of explaining this. The role of mythology in writing is important to me so this is interesting and will make your thesis interesting.
Very nice. I especially like that last line.
Thanks ladies.
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