Inroduction

This dissertation is an invitation to the examination of a series of theoretical discussion on fantasy in order to shed light on the historical and cultural specificities of fantasy within the Hong Kong context.

This thesis hence examines the use of fantasy in A Disctionary of Two Cities published in 2012 and co-written by Tse Hiu-hung and Hon Lai-chu, through the theoretical lens of two Western theorists Rosemary Jackson and Andre Breton in regard to three premises: 1) Fantasy traces the absence within the dominant cultural order; 2) it does not only escape reality, but also re-combines or inverts it and 3) it offers a fragmented and ambivalent vision for the establishment of the truth.

Fantasy acts as a moment of uncertainty, indeterminacy, ambiguity between the realms of real and unreal.

Wan Shun Yu Nicola: Posted on Facebook and IG on Dec 27, 2022

Highlights

• Hon Lai-chu and Tse Hiu-hung adopt the structure of a dictionary, which emblazons fixed words an meanings to entail the tales of different cities with fears and desires.
• The signs and symbols lend themselves to different meanings and coherence to the journey and its representation, leading to the fluidity for the irruption of the uncanniness of urban spaces, specific to the situation of Hong Kong.
• The form of dictionary yields a postmodern approach for readers to be divested of individual concerns in the labyrinth city space and removed from the domestic and the mundane, enabling the defamiliarization of the customary lasped into a dependence on a familiar.

Highlights

• The authors are free from the systematic structure of languages, they can ignore the official manings and grant the words with free-floating quality.
• The words they use to name the cities are lopped off with their regularity by playing with homonyms (e.g. Two Cities 雙城 and Vulnerable Cities 傷城), semantics (e.g. Puppet 木偶 / Partner made of Wood 木偶; Holiday 假期 / Fake Date 假期), and morphology (Lost and Found 拾遺 / Found and Lost 拾|遺).
• They speculate on the possibility of fantasy as a mode to reimagine dystopian versionns of Hong Kong and found that fantasy is oriented in several ways.

Highlights

1. Fantasy in contemporary Hong Kong calls for an extrication from the conventional world by the immanent decomposition and destruction of order.
2. The subversive nature of fantasy is employed to protest the stereotipical norm expectation of society projected onto certain roles of people.
3. Fantasy acts as a moment of uncertainty, indeterminancy, ambiguoty between the realms of real and unreal.
4. The instability of narratives, to which Rosemary Jackson refers "problems of vision", enables writers to "explore the difficulties of interpreting events".

Experience at MALCS

It has been a great experience having enrolled in MALCS programme where courses, teachers and support are of the highest calibre. I found several courses inspiring that have sparked me to engage in wider research and firther studies. With a wealth of experience, teachers in MALCS are not only friendly but also very passionate about their specialties. I feel extremel lucky that one of my supervisors had given me helpful and professional academic advice on pursuing a PhD after the course.