Science Fiction And Fantasy

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 20 University of Trier language: English abstract: What makes a text a science fiction text? What makes it a fantasy text? Inthis study I would like to discuss why it is impossible to clearly draw a linebetween these two genres. In order to do so I am going to focus on thejustification of the unreal respectively the supernatural elements of astory. I shall be discussing why a text can be considered a science fictiontext or a fantasy text - and why in some cases there is no clear answer tothe question of which genre a text is belongs to. While one might answer thetwo questions put at the beginning of this study rather quickly by stating arule of thumb - scientific elements make a text a science fiction textmagical ones make it a fantasy text - it is obvious that this would lead to avery broad definition. It is thus necessary to go into detail which I am goingto do. In order to investigate what apart from the technical and the magicalelements are the characteristics of the respective genres mentioned at thebeginning I am going to give the definitions of these terms which can befound in standard reference texts. In order to go into detail I shall add moreinformation from academic literature about the fantastic genre which bothscience fiction and fantasy are part of. I would then like to go a step furtherby testing the definitions with the help of three texts - H.G. Wells's TheWar of the Worlds as an example for the science fiction genre and BramStoker's Dracula as an example for a fantasy text. In addition I shall bediscussing Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. In this text thereare elements of both science fiction and of fantasy. After this I would like toconclude my study.Any selection of texts will necessarily be arbitrary as it is impossibleto include everything into a study like this. I chose three tex