Location
Weatherford, Oklahoma
Document Type
Paper
Event Website
https://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-54.htm
Start Date
24-7-2026 1:30 PM
End Date
24-7-2026 2:20 PM
Description
In his seminal essay “On Fairy-stories” (1939), J.R.R. Tolkien introduces the concept of Faërian drama: experiences with a “realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism,” where the viewer feels he is “bodily inside [a] Secondary World” but instead is “in a dream that some other mind is weaving.” This framing structure is used, though not called by this name, in many other texts. In a series of four previously published essays, I have attempted to explore and codify this concept. Picking up a theme hinted at but not explored in my previous papers, what happens when the faërian drama is a shared experience? In the first season of Russian Doll (2019) the situation of the two viewpoint characters is similar to that of the captive soldiers in Christopher Fry’s A Sleep of Prisoners (1951): “I can’t get out alone,” one man says in their final dream; “Neither can you” (45). The main text will be the first season of Russian Doll, in which building and strengthening relationships is essential to both main characters on their parallel real-life pathways as they work through the Faërian drama in which they are enmeshed. Other texts will include Schmigadoon! (Apple TV, 2021-2022) and The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Stuart Turton, Bloomsbury, 2018).
Creative Commons License
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Included in
Shared Trauma, Shared Drama: Faërian Drama in Russian Doll and Elsewhere
Weatherford, Oklahoma
In his seminal essay “On Fairy-stories” (1939), J.R.R. Tolkien introduces the concept of Faërian drama: experiences with a “realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism,” where the viewer feels he is “bodily inside [a] Secondary World” but instead is “in a dream that some other mind is weaving.” This framing structure is used, though not called by this name, in many other texts. In a series of four previously published essays, I have attempted to explore and codify this concept. Picking up a theme hinted at but not explored in my previous papers, what happens when the faërian drama is a shared experience? In the first season of Russian Doll (2019) the situation of the two viewpoint characters is similar to that of the captive soldiers in Christopher Fry’s A Sleep of Prisoners (1951): “I can’t get out alone,” one man says in their final dream; “Neither can you” (45). The main text will be the first season of Russian Doll, in which building and strengthening relationships is essential to both main characters on their parallel real-life pathways as they work through the Faërian drama in which they are enmeshed. Other texts will include Schmigadoon! (Apple TV, 2021-2022) and The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Stuart Turton, Bloomsbury, 2018).
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythcon/mc54/schedule/1
