Fantasy Theme Analysis

Basic Concepts and Vocabulary

The term fantasy theme is potentially confusing. A fantasy theme is a special kind of story. The word fantasy is commonly associated with fiction rather than fact. However, we tell stories about factual real-world events just as we tell fictional stories. We tell both kinds of stories about our world to make sense of it and to make meaning out of what is often confusingly chaotic.

Not all stories we tell become fantasy themes. A fantasy theme is a shared story that is believed and internalized by many people. That shared story is a particular interpretation of some significant aspect of our world. Fantasy themes that closely resemble one another are sometimes grouped into “fantasy types.” Some fantasy themes are accepted as fundamentally accurate and with substantial links to widely accepted [Page 549]facts. For example, many persons, including Barack Obama, point to “American Exceptionalism,” the belief in the ability of a person regardless of origin to be able to gain success in the United States. Others may not be accurate at all but are still believed. For example, the term “Honest Abe” refers to the belief that President Lincoln always told the truth, despite numerous incidents that cast doubt on that claim.

A group of people who all share belief in a selected group of compatible fantasy themes become a “rhetorical community” that is characterized by a particular “rhetorical vision” of the nature of human reality. “Insiders” of a rhetorical community accept and internalize particular fantasy themes. “Outsiders” are either unaware of them or reject them. Over time, a specific fantasy theme may become so familiar to insiders that only an “insider cue,” such as a brief allusion, code word, or slogan, can remind insiders of the fantasy theme, as in the well-known concept of the “inside joke.”

Development of Fantasy Theme Analysis

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Bormann was studying the decision-making process in small group communication. He found other research on group communication done earlier by Robert Bales. Bales labeled one of 12 categories for analyzing content of group interaction as “dramatizes.” The paradigm of conceptualizing human communication as “drama,” like a stage play, was already commonly used in communication studies based on the extensive work of Kenneth Burke.

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