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"Magic World Behind the Curtain" - Ed Menta
This book is focused around Andrei Serban, an American theater director. Serban not only has a relationship with productions of Greek theater, he was the inspiration for the term "New Fabulism"--what a New York Times critic coined as turning myths into tales of morality. His work combines theater conventions using a mix of fairy tale and myth. Curiously, this term was featured while reviewing Serban's production of The King Stag and The Serpent Woman. If this book will end up relevant remains to be seen, but it's a curious start.

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"A Second Ribcage: Fiction and an Article on New Wave Fabulism, Trauma, and the Environment" - Emily Cappettini =====

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"How a queer fabulism came to dominate contemporary women’s writing" - Kit Haggard =====

"Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon" - Stephen R. Wilk
This serves as a general overview of the myth, as well as providing in-depth academic interpretations of Medusa's true meaning, her societal significance.

"The Laugh of Medusa" - Hélène Cixous
Though the actually possibility of directly connecting Medusa, the figure not the metaphor, to queer studies remains to be seen, the use of her as a larger allegory by front runner in queer studies and poststructuralist feminist theory, invites us to take a closer look at the myth and it's effective queering of the mythological narrative.

Medusa in Feminism
Sources:

"Laughing With Medusa" - Zajko and Leonard

"Medusa" - Wilk

"Literary Theory; a guide for the perplexed" - Klages (excerpts from "structuralism and the study of myth" and "Helene Cixous and 'The Laugh of Medusa'") The Timeless Myth of Medusa, a Rape Victim Turned Into a Monster - Broadly.

The Rape of Medusa: Feminist Revision of Medusa in Stanford and DuPlessis

[Existing wiki article discusses Medusa as the personification of feminist rage, "female fury personified."]

Even in contemporary pop culture, Medusa has became largely synonymous with feminine rage. Through many of her iterations, Medusa pushes back against a story that seeks to place the male, Perseus, at its center, blameless and heroic. Author Sibylle Baumbach described Medusa as a “multimodal image of intoxication, petrifaction, and luring attractiveness," citing her seductive contemporary representation, as well as her dimensionality, as the reason for her longevity. Elizabeth Johnston's November 2016 Atlantic essay called Medusa the original 'Nasty Woman.' Johnston goes on to say that as Medusa has been repeatedly compared to Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, she proves her merit as an icon, finding relevance even in modern politics. "Medusa has since haunted Western imagination, materializing whenever male authority feels threatened by female agency," writes Johnston. Beyond that, Medusa's story is, Johnston argues, a rape narrative. A story of victim blaming, one that she says sounds all too familiar in a current American context.

"Medusa is widely known as a monstrous creature with snakes in her hair whose gaze turns men to stone. Through the lens of theology, film, art, and feminist literature, my students and I map how her meaning has shifted over time and across cultures. In so doing, we unravel a familiar narrative thread: In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority."

- Elizabeth Johnston

Feminist theorist Hélène Cixous famously tackled the myth in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa." She argues that men's retelling of the narrative turned Medusa into a monster because they feared female desire. "The Laugh of the Medusa" is largely a call to arms, urging women to reclaim their identity through writing as she rejects the patriarchal society of Western culture. Cixous calls writing "an act which will not only 'realize' the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal." She claims "we must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman." Cixous wants to destroy the phallogocentric system, and to empower women's bodies and language. "You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her," writes Cixous. "And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing."

Brainstorm/to do:
Further outline the distinctions of fabulism and magical realism, present more common examples (ie: more than Lewis) and outline forerunners of the genre (Calvino, Serban). Maybe more details about the origin of fabulism, and the specificities of "modern fabulism" versus fabulism alone.

What do people need to know? What is missing?

Fabulism and its parallel to queer narratives, why do we use myths to communicate?

Medusa--medusa in a feminist context, "the laugh of medusa,"

Fabulism
Though often used to refer to works of magical realism, fabulism incorporates fantasy elements into reality, using myths and fables to critique the exterior world and offer direct allegorical interpretations. Austrian-American child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim suggested that fairy tales have psychological merit. They are used to translate trauma into a context that people can more easily understand and help to process difficult truths. Bettelheim posited that the darkness and morality of traditional fairy tales allowed children to grapple with questions of fear through symbolism. Fabulism helped to work through these complexities and, in the words of Bettelheim, "make physical what is otherwise ephemeral or ineffable in an attempt...of understanding those things that we struggle the most to talk about: loss, love, transition."

Author Amber Sparks described fabulism as blending fantastical elements into a realistic setting. Crucial to the genre, said Sparks, is that the elements are often borrowed from specific myths, fairy tales, and folktales. Unlike magical realism, it does not just use general magical elements, but directly incorporates details from well known stories. "Our lives are bizarre, meandering, and fantastic," said Hannah Gilham of the Washington Square Review regarding fabulism. "Shouldn’t our fiction reflect that?"

While Magical Realism is traditionally used to refer to works that are Latin American in origin, fabulism is not tied to any specific culture. Rather than focusing on political realities, fabulism tends to focus on the entirety of the human experience through the mechanization of fairy tales and myths. This can be seen in the works of C.S. Lewis, who was once referred to as the greatest fabulist of the 20th century. His 1956 novel Till We Have Faces has been referenced as a fabulist retelling. This re-imagining of the story of Cupid and Psyche uses an age-old myth to impart moralistic knowledge on the reader. A Washington Post review of a Lewis biography discusses how his work creates "a fiction" in order to deliver a lesson. Says the Post of Lewis, "The fabulist...illuminates the nature of things through a tale both he and his auditors, or readers, know to be an ingenious analogical invention."

Italo Calvino is an example of a writer in the genre who uses the term fabulist. Calvino is best known for his book trilogy, Our Ancestors, a collection of moral tales told through surrealist fantasy. Like many fabulist collections, his work is often classified as an allegory for children. Calvino wanted fiction, like folk tales, to act as a teaching device. "Time and again, Calvino insisted on the 'educational potential' of the fable and its function as a moral exemplum," wrote journalist Ian Thomson about the Italian Fabulist.

While reviewing the work of Romanian-born American theater director Andrei Serban, New York Times critic Mel Gussow coined the term "The New Fabulism." Serban is famous for his reinventions in the art of staging and directing, known for directing works like "The Stag King" and "The Serpent Woman," both fables adapted into plays by Carl Gozzi. Gussow defined "The New Fabulism" as "taking ancient myths and turn(ing) them into morality tales." In Ed Menta's book, The Magic Behind the Curtain, he explores Serban's work and influence within the context of American theatre. He wrote that the Fabulist style allowed Serban to neatly combine technical form and his own imagination. Through directing fabulist works, Serban can inspire an audience with innate goodness and romanticism through the magic of theatre. "The New Fabulism has allowed Serban to pursue his own ideals of achieving on sage the naivete of a children's theater," wrote Menta. "It is in this simplicity, this innocence, this magic that Serban finds any hope for contemporary theatre at all."