Ryan Denson
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
ILO 2025 CFP
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Abstract
Imaginative landscapes and otherworlds are made fantastical, not only by the qualities of these spaces themselves, but also by the living beings that dwell within and come from such spaces. A particular example of such entities can be seen in the Germanic folklore of fairies and elves, humanoid beings that are allusive of humanity, yet still eerily distinct and placed in opposition to humanity in narrative contexts. Such beings serve to characterise the spaces they inhabit as profoundly 'other.' The same can be said for other figures like the Hyperboreans of Greco-Roman myth. In a similar manner, imaginary animals are another prominent category of being inhabiting these spaces and are especially notable for the growing field of animal studies in the humanities. Such creatures are habitually derived from actual animals in terms of their forms, qualities, and behaviours, but function as imaginative 'twists' on those real animals. Hellhounds of medieval folklore are a clear example, being similar in form to actual canines, though with more fierce characteristics, and often said to intrude into the 'normal' world as omens of impending doom. Other imaginative animals, from Herodotus' gold-digging ants to the phoenix, griffins, and dragons, can also be said to be imaginative extrapolations of real animals, crafted to serve particular narrative roles and characterise exoticized spaces. This year's theme focuses on such animate beings, the living creatures and entities that populate imaginative landscapes and otherworlds. This includes the exploration of such figures to provide insight into cultural considerations of the 'normal' world and how they contribute to the construction and perception of such spaces in the human imagination.
Related papers
Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous, and the Human
2013
" Fire-breathing dragons, beautiful mermaids, majestic unicorns, terrifying three-headed dogs—these fantastic creatures have long excited our imagination. Medieval authors placed them in the borders of manuscripts as markers of the boundaries of our understanding. Tales from around the world place these beasts in deserts, deep woods, remote islands, ocean depths, and alternate universes—just out of our reach. And in the sections on the apocalypse in the Bible, they proliferate as the end of time approaches, with horses with heads like lions, dragons, and serpents signaling the destruction of the world. Legends tell us that imaginary animals belong to a primordial time, before everything in the world had names, categories, and conceptual frameworks. In this book, Boria Sax digs into the stories of these fabulous beasts. He shows how, despite their liminal role, imaginary animals like griffins, dog-men, yetis, and more are socially constructed creatures, created through the same complex play of sensuality and imagination as real ones. Tracing the history of imaginary animals from Paleolithic art to their roles in stories such as Harry Potter and even the advent of robotic pets, he reveals that these extraordinary figures help us psychologically—as monsters, they give form to our amorphous fears, while as creatures of wonder, they embody our hopes. Their greatest service, Sax concludes, is to continually challenge our imaginations, directing us beyond the limitations of conventional beliefs and expectations. "
Α Kaleidoscope of Mythical Beasts, Beyond Time and Space: Keys to Understanding Oneself and Culture
Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura, 2021
The paper aspires to provide a critical presentation of the content of the Chasing Mythical Beasts: The Reception of Ancient Monsters in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture collective volume, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak (2020), and an interpretative framing for the recurrent emergence of mythical beasts in literature and other media for children and young people. Famous mythical monsters – the Minotaur, Medusa, Pegasus, centaurs, and sirens – reappear either in their original form or in other versions in a wide range of stories, becoming a vehicle for critical reflections over a variety of subjects, like the encounter with the Other, the coming of age, the female power, totalitarianism, ethical dilemmas, or human relationships, to mention some of them. Monsters’ diffusion in almost all cultural fields highlights their universality, recognisability, popularity, and flexibility to adjust to requirements and priorities of all times and spaces. Their inexhaustible potential remains t...
FASTITOCALON Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern Vol. VI · 2016 FANTASTIC ANIMALS, ANIMALS IN THE FANTASTIC Issue 1 & 2
The 2016 issue of Fastitocalon - Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern takes a look at animals in fantastic literature as well as fantastic animals. The uploaded file contains the Table of Contents and the editors' Introduction.
Textual Animals Turned into Narrative Fantasies: The Imaginative Middle Ages
Textual Animals Turned into Narrative Fantasies: The Imaginative Middle Ages, 2018
This article focuses on the concept 'reconstruction of the world' proposed by G. Zoran in his theoretical work on the representation of space in narrative. It makes special reference to the inter-medially transformative processes that narrators and audiences undergo, as materially concrete objects in space turn into representations in the verbal medium. Investigating the possible bodies of knowledge common to the participants in the communicative process, the article specifically discusses animals widely described in late antique and medieval Jewish folk tales and considers the possibilities for reconstructing the sources of shared imaginary worlds.
Intelligence, Creativity and Fantasy : Proceedings of the 5th International Multidisciplinary Congress (PHI 2019), October 7-9, 2019, Paris, France
New University of Lisbon's Repository (New University of Lisbon), 2019
Among other monstrosities and myths from the sea and aquatic bodies, the double-tailed mermaid has been profusely described and depicted in early modern literature, bestiaries and natural history treaties as in the iconography and cartography. Usually shown as a female form with one head and upper body and holding its two fish-like tails, it did represent the epitome of beautiful nature creations but also its strangeness and hybridity. With virtues and sins, love and danger within the same body, it could be the reflection of the moral and human acts' (dis)conformities. Besides the symbolic meaning of the mirror, or the twinning, could these mythical beings also be the result of non-understood observations of rare events in the sea? In this paper, more than providing answers, I am proposing some questions regarding early nature apprehension and natural knowledge production by relating the physicality of double-tailed mermaids with the real, yet highly obscure, occurrences of conjoined twins in sea animals. Conjoined or Siamese twins have, in fact, rarely been described in wild (marine) mammals but a couple of cases in cetaceans just came to light in recent years. Even though descriptions of monsters sometimes reveal more about people's minds and perceptions than they do about the animals, the physical similarities between these two types of marine monsters, and the possibility of real observations resulting in imaginary animals will be discussed.
Possible worlds: a reading of three artworks from the Creative creatures exhibition
Literator, 2009
Possible worlds: a reading of three artworks from the Creative creatures exhibition
Toward an Imaginary Animal Studies
Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies 6:2 (Spring 2015), 166-177
Review of The Imaginary of Animals by Annabelle Dufourcq
Environmental Philosophy, 2023
Behind or perhaps beneath the persistence of animals in human dreams, phantasies, myths, images, and symbols is what Annabelle Dufourcq calls the imaginary of animals: the pre-personal or anonymous ontological source from which the subjective imaginations of human and nonhuman animals derive. Dufourcq maintains that this imaginary realm is ontologically originary, specifying at one point that her insistence on derivation is not a claim about Jungian archetypes. Rather than referring to the animals' mode of being as unconscious, she employs throughout the term oneiric (of dreams or dreaming), in reference to the manifold ways that animals present themselves to one another and to us. 1 She suggests that animals themselves are expressions of "an oneiric thought that forms below the conscious-unconscious duality and constitutes the living heart even of the highly lucid and reflexive forms of human thinking" (232). In contrast with what she refers to as the more standard rationalist, or reductive-objective scientific approach to animals and imagination, which favors human thought to the detriment of animal awareness, Dufourcq addresses oneiric thought by employing what she refers to as a subjective-poetic, or mythologicalimaginative approach. 1 In doing so she draws upon a tradition of employing the term in the field of biosemiotics, plus the late Merleau-Ponty's usage of this term in the same manner in his Nature lectures. See especially Chapter 4 of The Imaginary of
Fantastic morphologies: animal form between mythology and Evo-Devo,
“Thaumàzein. Online Journal of Philosophy”, numero tematico – Morphology, Plasticity and Transformation between Philosophy and Biology, a cura di A. Minelli, S. Tedesco, R.M. Lupo, vol. 8, 2020, pp. 39-58 (published: 2021-07-06), 2020
Since ancient times, man has shown a genuine passion for the recombination of visual elements in unusual and extraordinary forms; but, if the ancients admitted the existence of mythological creatures, today we are fully aware that their existence is limited to the ontological domain of the “merely thinkable” because imaginary beings are irreconcilable with physical and biological laws. In this article I try to elucidate what differentiates from a morphological point of view the imaginary beings described by the pens of poets (such as Sphinx, mermaids and centaurs) from bizarre but existing animals (i.e. the small South American Axolotl, the Yeti Crab, etc.) or from some specimens belonging to common animal species, but which present strange morphologies due to genetic errors. In dialogue with some positions of contemporary biology and literary criticism, I tried to investigate the rules of form to understand how historical and architectural constraints can influence the morphology of the living and why these existing creatures generate in us at the same time a feeling of wonder and dismay.
Creatures of fiction, objects of myth
Analysis, 2014
Artifactualists hold that some abstracta are contingent entities, products of the intentional activities of people. A great many artifactualists are fictional creationists, asserting that fictonal characters are abstracta of this sort, but some, notably Kripke (1973), Salmon (1998, 2002), and Braun (2005), further embrace mythical creationism. They hold that certain entities that figure in false theories are likewise abstracta that are produced by our intentional activities. A paradigm example would be Vulcan, the planet proposed by Le Verrier to be the cause of perturbations in the orbit of Mercury. I here argue that one may not reasonably take the metaphysical route travelled by Kripke, Salmon, and Braun; even if one holds that fictional characters are artifacts, one ought not further hold that mythical objects are, too. Realism about mythical objects is best accommodated by a traditional, Platonic conception of abstracta.
IMAGINATIVE LANDSCAPES AND OTHERWORLDS
Animate Beings
Online Conference (June 14)
Imaginative landscapes and otherworlds are made fantastical, not only by the qualities of these spaces themselves, but also
by the living beings that dwell within and come from such spaces. A particular example of such entities can be seen in the
Germanic folklore of fairies and elves, humanoid beings that are allusive of humanity, yet still eerily distinct and placed in
opposition to humanity in narrative contexts. Such beings serve to characterise the spaces they inhabit as profoundly
‘other.’ The same can be said for other figures like the Hyperboreans of Greco-Roman myth.
In a similar manner, imaginary animals are another prominent category of being inhabiting these spaces and are especially
notable for the growing field of animal studies in the humanities. Such creatures are habitually derived from actual animals
in terms of their forms, qualities, and behaviours, but function as imaginative ‘twists’ on those real animals. Hellhounds of
medieval folklore are a clear example, being similar in form to actual canines, though with more fierce characteristics, and
often said to intrude into the ‘normal’ world as omens of impending doom. Other imaginative animals, from Herodotus’
gold-digging ants to the phoenix, griffins, and dragons, can also be said to be imaginative extrapolations of real animals,
crafted to serve particular narrative roles and characterise exoticized spaces.
This year’s theme focuses on such animate beings, the living creatures and entities that populate imaginative landscapes and
otherworlds. This includes the exploration of such figures to provide insight into cultural considerations of the ‘normal’
world and how they contribute to the construction and perception of such spaces in the human imagination.
Contributions might include, but are not limited to:
The role of non-human anthropomorphic beings in the construction of fantastical spaces
Imaginative conceptions of animals in mythology
The function(s) and perceptions of hybrid human/animal beings in folkloric narratives
Analysis of folkloric figures that are commonly classified as ‘cryptids’
Studies of other conceptions of animate beings, such as sentient plants, artificial
creatures, or living landscapes
This online conference is jointly hosted by Canterbury Christ Church University and the
University of Exeter. It will take place on June 14, 2025. Proposals should be not more than 250
words for a 15-20 minute paper.
The deadline for submission is April 20, 2025.
Please include your name and a brief bio (50-100 words) with submissions. For
those wishing to submit proposals for panels, please limit participants to 3 and
follow the above criteria; a bio will need to be submitted for each participant.
Please send abstracts to iloconferenceofficial@gmail.com