Austin, Texas -- Imagine a world ruled by a large hog and threatened along its eastern border by fierce wyverns and snollygosters. Now describe in detail one of the following geographical features of this world: the Humongous Geode, the Mad Mesa, or the Flying Island of Tlusc.
For students at the University of Texas at Austin who are in the midst of creating their own fantasy worlds, the question seems perfectly reasonable. The world is “High Thefarie,” and the landmarks exist only in the minds of the students who describe them. It’s the kind of creative exercise that has made “Classical Civilization 322,” also known as “Introduction to Parageography,” one of the university’s most popular courses.
The author of the course and the creator of High Thefarie is Douglass S. Parker, a professor of classics, a poet, a jazz trombonist, and a card-carrying member of the International Wizard of Oz Club. (The club, based in Escanaba, Mich., boasts 3,000 members, holds conventions, and publishes a journal.)
Sitting in an office crammed floor to ceiling with books ranging from The Odyssey to C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mr. Parker discusses why he created a course about parageography, a word he coined to mean the study of imaginary worlds.
“I think it is important that at some point in your life, you make something,” he says. “The imagination atrophies if you don’t use it, and most people don’t.”
Behind him, the walls of his office are papered with posters of Narnia, Lewis’s imaginary world; a scene from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit; and a map of the world turned upside-down. Lying on a table is a map of his own creation, High Thefarie.
For all its eccentricities, “Introduction to Parageography” is a rigorous course whose reading list includes parts of The Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and more-contemporary selections like Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and L._Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz.
Students study the way those authors treat their imaginary landscapes, gardens, hells, utopias, and fairylands. They then use these examples as models for their own imaginary worlds, which they must create and document by the end of the semester.
In a course handout, Mr. Parker explains the main project as follows: “Your world should be as various and complex, as fully conceived and executed, as is possible, with the object of convincing me of its reality. It is to be bolstered by such items as maps, genealogies, pictures, official documents, letters, travelers’ accounts, print-outs, tapes . . .”
The purpose, he says, is to get students to use and develop their creative imaginations. In the years he has taught the course, Mr. Parker has had students develop everything from science-fiction worlds to pastoral worlds, miniature worlds, alternate Icelands, and a world formed when a section of New England highway separated from the rest of the world for 80 years.
Meeting individually with each student, Mr. Parker gently prods those who insist they have no idea how to go about the assignment. An aerospace-engineering student created a world inside a hollow sphere and tried to solve the scientific problems that exist in such a world. A student who planned to go into his father’s locksmith business ended up writing about a world of locks and keys.
Another student, whom Mr. Parker says he still worries about, created a punishment world. “It was the worst hell you could possibly imagine,” Mr. Parker recalls. “People were deluded with false hope, were shown to false exits, and had to endure all kinds of horrible punishments.”
Despite its heavy writing requirements, the class is popular with students and fills up quickly. Students consider the class refreshingly offbeat.
“I suppose he is a little eccentric, but he’s eccentric in a way students can relate to,” says Susanne Hofstra, a graduate student who works as Mr. Parker’s teaching assistant. “How many professors do you know who are up on the latest science fiction?”
Michael Gagarin, chairman of the Department of Classics, says he’s never had any doubts about the educational value of Mr. Parker’s courses.
“He tends to do this kind of thing -- he works off the beaten track,” Mr. Gagarin says. “The first time you hear about a course like this, you might think the guy’s nuts. But there really is a sound scholarly basis for it.”
The eight writing requirements for the course are spelled out in the syllabus as a “statement re ye eight labours.” The first is a short paper describing in detail a strange or eerie underground locale the student has experienced. The second is a short paper analyzing an imaginary world drawn from a text that is not included on the course reading list. The third describes the language of the imaginary world the student is creating, and in the fourth, the student must transform the city of Austin into a fantasy world. The papers build up to the final project, which is the creation of an entire imaginary world.
Students’ improvisational skills are put to the test in the final examination, in which they are asked specific questions to which they cannot possibly know the answers. The questions concern Mr. Parker’s world, High Thefarie, which he has described in bits and pieces to the students throughout the semester. On one examination, for instance, he asked students to describe three out of eight imaginary places in High Thefarie, which had never been described to them. Students must create the answers on the spot, and their answers must fit in with what they have been told about High Thefarie.
Mr. Parker, who plays trombone with local jazz bands, explained at a recent seminar the exhilaration he feels when improvising.
“To be ready, at a given instant, when the pointing finger indicates now, to stand up before an audience and create something -- that is, for me, the real existential moment, the time when one is really alive.”
Hoping students would share his enthusiasm for creating something on the spot, he created High Thefarie as raw material for the students’ final examination. The other reason for creating High Thefarie, he admits, was “to allay the creative gnawings of a professor who can’t bear to be out of the act himself.”
Mr. Parker, who won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his translations of Greek and Roman comedies, began teaching the parageography course at Texas in 1973.
“It was more or less off the wall,” he says of the early version of the course. “It was still near enough to the 60’s to be able to do things like that.”
Concerned that the course be “classically responsible,” he imposed lengthy reading and writing requirements. An avid reader of fantasy and science-fiction books as a child, he taught courses in children’s literature and science fiction early in his career.
“I was wondering if there were any gimmick that would allow me to teach imaginative literature that would still have some classical basis,” he says. “I eventually thought of parageography, which would start with The Odyssey and wind up with The Lord of the Rings.
“It’s an article of faith with me that everyone has creativity and has to get it out.”
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Description: In a classics course called “Introduction to Parageography,” students are encouraged to develop their creative abilities by studying imaginary worlds in classical and modern literature and creating a fantasy world of their own. The authors range from Homer and Virgil to C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Students use the literary examples as models to create their own worlds.
Format: The class, which meets twice a week, is taught by a professor of classics and a teaching assistant. Students are assigned readings that deal with imaginary realms, and discuss different authors’ treatment of fantasy landscapes.
Requirements and Grading: Each student must complete eight writing assignments, beginning with several short papers and building up to a paper of at least 15 pages that describes the imaginary world created by the student. The final paper must be accompanied by maps and travelers’ accounts that make the world appear more real. The final examination tests the student’s ability to improvise creative answers to questions about an imaginary world created by the professor.
Reading List: The 14 required books (some of which are read only in part) include Dante’s “Inferno,” Homer’s “The Odyssey,” C. S. Lewis’s “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” and L. Frank Baum’s “The Patchwork Girl of Oz.”