SOURCE: McCaffery, Larry. “Form, Formula, and Fantasy: Generative Structures in Contemporary Fiction.” In Bridges to Fantasy, edited by George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, pp. 21-37. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

In the following essay, McCaffery expounds on the “inadequacy of the concept of fantasy” as it is currently defined as useful in understanding the “nature and purpose of much contemporary literature” identified with that label.

It may be that men ceaselessly re-inject into narrative what they have known, what they have experienced; but if they do, at least it is in a form which has vanquished repetition and instituted the model of a process of becoming.

Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text

The Poet, without being aware of it, moves in an order of possible relationships and transformations. … Here is the final and noblest game of skill and hazard, the wager against odds, number...