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%0 Thesis
%A Köhler, Anna
%T Gendered magic : how cultural models shape fantasy worlds
%V 98
%I Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
%V Dissertation
%C Berlin
%M RWTH-2025-08743
%@ 978-3-11-914966-2
%B Narratologia
%P VIII, 337 Seiten
%D 2025
%Z Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2024
%X Why is it that storyworlds in fantasy literature, for all their limitless potential, tend to cling to patriarchal structures and binary notions of gender? Based on the cognitive framework of Cultural Models Theory (CMT), this thesis analyses the intersection between cultural models of gender and magic in four popular contemporary fantasy series: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy, and Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy. Magic as a core manifestation of the fantastic that sets fantasy apart from other genres serves as the focal point to explore the strategies by which fantasy engages with gender issues on its own terms. Through the lens of gender negotiations, this thesis pursues the larger question of how literature, by shaping readers’ (shared) mental models, can impede but also contribute to cultural change. Researchers in the field of cognitive literary studies (CLS) have recognized the potential of CMT as a framework to explain how readers arrive at both shared and individual interpretations, but so far there are very few applications of the theory as an analytical tool to complement traditional close-reading approaches. Furthermore, while the concept of literary genre has long been recognized as an intrinsically cognitive one, there have been no systematic explorations of genres as cultural models that are essential to readers’ meaning-making, despite the clear potential of CLS to advance genre theory as a whole. This thesis outlines that potential and explores the implications of understanding genres as cultural models for literary analysis. In addition, cognitive approaches so far have primarily focused on the relevance and activation of readers’ actual-world mental models during the reading process and overlooked that these models are frequently suspended in favour of more salient genre models. For speculative fiction in particular, this focus on actual-world models at the exclusion of genre models is not tenable. This thesis therefore provides an in-depth discussion of how cultural models work when we read non-mimetic texts such as fantasy, as well as what a cultural model of fantasy might look like. More generally, this thesis demonstrates that genre fiction overall is a particularly accessible research subject for CLS because it foregrounds its usage of readers’ genre models. In this thesis, I am also conceptualizing gender as a set of cultural models, i.e. as widely shared mental frames of masculinity and femininity that guide our expectations and social interactions. Literary gender studies have remained largely untouched by cognitive approaches despite the wealth of empirical cognitive research on gender. This thesis provides a review of these studies as a foundation for a reconstruction of Western models of masculinity and femininity. The findings serve as a baseline for the subsequent analysis of how these models factor into the reading process – of the ways in which readers bring their own (stereotypical) gender expectations into their text reception and of the textual cues and strategies that prompt them to do so, or else disrupt that process and thereby confront readers with the insufficiency of their mental models. This thesis demonstrates how CMT can advance our understanding of the unique challenges that fantasy poses to author-reader communication and of the textual strategies through which these challenges can be overcome. This, in turn, is beneficial to any analysis of how fantasy engages with actual-world issues. As a non-mimetic form of fiction, fantasy has a transformative, transgressive potential to destabilize dominant cultural models of gender through defamiliarization – or to perpetuate binary gender models by depicting them as universally relevant even in impossible worlds. In each of the four texts analysed here, familiar models of masculinity and femininity function as ways of anchoring the impossible within the familiar. In Harry Potter in particular, an ostensibly gender-neutral magic system frequently relies on stereotypical notions of femininity to make sense. While the other three texts, equally mass-market fiction, do not fundamentally reject the gender binary either, they do make use of the fantastic to challenge normative binaries, particularly those related to restrictive gender roles and the distinction between self and Other: The Discworld novels construct a binary magic system in which wizardry and witchcraft are two distinct professions, providing nuanced commentary on gendered occupations and role expectations in the actual world. In the Farseer and Bartimaeus trilogies, readers are confronted with magic systems that are not overtly restricted by gender but are clearly gender-coded (in their own distinct ways) and that the protagonists must learn not just to navigate, but to overcome. Furthermore, all four texts imagine alternative masculinities by emphasising the value of communion – which studies have shown to be widely seen as a feminine trait – for all. Finally, each text explores actual-world power structures (not limited to but including those of gender) through literalization in fantastic contexts, thus providing readers with new perspectives on that which they take for granted. Overall, my analysis demonstrates the potential of CMT to improve our understanding of the interplay of author, reader, text, and cultural context and the significant role of human cognition therein.
%F PUB:(DE-HGF)11 ; PUB:(DE-HGF)3
%9 Dissertation / PhD ThesisBook
%U https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/1020050