ian archetypes, language structures, or philosophical systems--a theo-
retical balance is struck.

In the lead essay, "Clinamen: Toward a Theory of Fantasy," Harold Bloom
, extending critical categories--Gnostic and Freudian in inspi-
ration--developed in his Anxiety of Influence to literary fantasy, discov-
ers the aesthetic dynamic of this "belated version of romance" to reside
in "its ironic or allegorical conflict between a stance of absolute free-
dom and a hovering fear of total psychic overdetermination." In this
perspective, Bloom asserts, it is the compounding of Narcissism and
Prometheanism which produces the clinamen, or "swerve," that initi-
ates literary fantasy. The next four essays, as a group, discuss from
diverse and divergent angles the freedoms and limitations of this same
fantasy process on the level of forms and structures. In seeking to de-
fine the generative system that informs the works of such diverse con-
temporary writers as Borges, Delany, Coover, and Italo Calvino, Larry
McCaffery offers a model of literary creation which, while producing
what might seem to be fantasy, in fact may actually obviate the concept
of fantasy altogether. On the other hand, Marta Sánchez, arguing
against Todorov's claim that the twentieth century has produced no fan-
tastic literature, would recuperate fantasy as a formal category valid at
least for non-European literatures. In her extended analysis of Cortázar's
"Axolotl," she attempts to prove that its structures--which function, as
in the works McCaffery discusses, also on a plane of linguistic experi-
mentation--are fantastic, a transformation of the nineteenth-century
form rather than its denial. From a different angle Arlen Hansen, in his
essay on the closed, open, and looped structures of scientific fantasy,
considers the implications--both liberating and requalifying--of the
thesis that scientific as well as artistic propositions are "functional fan-
tasies, not absolute truths," and concludes with a demand for a new
look at science fiction as the contemporary literary form that most com-
pels us to recognize that fantasy serves the ends of both science and
art. Finally, David Clayton, beginning with the hypothesis that "fantas-
tic discourse can be defined only by its differential relation--of con-
junction and opposition--to another discourse and not to some extral-
inguistic reality," makes a sweeping examination of the interrelation of
"noematic" and "fantasmatic" discourse, passing from linguistic cate-
gories to the models of structural psychoanalysis only to return to the
study of individual texts and development in the historical context.
Here, on this final plane, Clayton concludes that modern literature is
not marked (as Todorov claims) by circumscription of the fantastic so
much as by liberation of the fantasmatic "in its own right."

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