Fantasy and Fairy Tales in Anglo-American Literature

16. a 17. září 2021

Katedra anglistiky Vás srdečně zve na konferenci na téma Fantasy and Fairy Tales in Anglo-American Literature, kterou bude pořádat ve dnech 16. a 17. září 2021.

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you anywhere.”
Albert Einstein

“Imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

According to both Kant and Einstein, there are strict limits to what human beings could know, nevertheless, there remains an intense human desire to surpass these limitations. Fantasy elements in literature draw on this desire to overcome the distance between the visible and the invisible, the physical and the spiritual, the familiar and the unknown, which is, according to Kant, a crucial element of the sublime. Fantasy and fairy tales attempt to span this gap through the sensuous presentation of the super sensuous, which can be, nevertheless, traced in the whole literary tradition from the medieval and Renaissance literature through the Gothic and Romantic imagery to postmodernism. In the words of Lyotard, the surprising, strange and shocking images can contribute not only to the development of perception, but also to the intensification of being.