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Classics of fantasy -- Heinlein, Tolkien, Herbert and the like -- rest on Andrea Barton's shelves. They've been read.

Terry Pratchett's books sprawl all over the kitchen, the bathroom, by the bed, everywhere. Those have been read, are being read, and will be read again.

"With Pratchett, you kind of live with it," said Barton, an instructor in the University of Alabama English department, teaching an interim course on his work, titled "Special Topics in Literature: Discworld."

Interim is a three-week period between the spring and summer semesters where educators slot in courses of personal interest, or those that work in a condensed setting. Over the years, interim courses have included everything from glass-blowing to archaeological digs to the rising fascination with zombies. Topics this year include the history, politics and art of knitting; event planning with a mock wedding for the final; and how TV's "Mad Men" de-romanticizes images of 1960s American culture.

"Probably most Americans don't recognize the name," Barton said, even though he sold more than 85 million copies of his books across 37 languages, in a career spanning five decades. In 2009, he was knighted for "services to literature." He was also appointed an OBE, Officer of the Order of the British Empire. His first Discworld book for children, "The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents," won the 2001 Carnegie Medal. In 2010, Pratchett was honored with the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.

Following a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's, the writer passed away March 12, 2015, at age 66.

"It's funny, given that he's someone who's so accessible to readers. He presented a blue-collar personality, but very smart, the kind of inherent smart you can't teach," Barton said. "It's interesting that the higher you go in academia, the more likely they are to recognize his work."

Discworld's the home of "What if?", as in "What if now-discarded legends of this world collided and came to life elsewhere in the universe?" It's flat, residing on the backs of four elephants who stand on the back of a worldwide turtle swimming through space. In most of its regions -- especially city-state Ankh-Morpork, a bit like London in the 18th century and New York City in the 19th -- humans live side by side with dwarves, gnomes, trolls, werewolves, vampires, small gods, wizards, witches, golems, and the occasional foul-smelling talking dog.

Some regions resemble and mock Scotland, Germany, Greece, Australia or other places, complete with archetype-busting creatures. Many eventually make their way to the big city to carve out subcultures -- in the case of dwarves, underground mostly, but also in rat-pie shops. To blend in, vampires attend a kind of Nosferatu AA, transferring obsessions with heaving bosoms and spurting blood to coffee, doughnuts and a jolly sing-song. Golems work -- never-endingly -- to buy freedom, achieved by rewriting chem, the words in their heads, after divining that "Words in the heart cannot be taken."

Pratchett subverted fantasy tropes to reflect human follies and foibles about gender, war, religion, technology, racism, xenophobia, and more.

"He creates this entire universe of characters you would want to know," Barton said, "and people who just seem very genuine, seem who they are.

"At times it's almost a kind of muted, almost dry, very quiet kind of funny, and at other times, it's just broad hilarity."

In "Soul Music," rock 'n' roll, of a sort, hits Discworld. Ideas for flickering images arise in "Moving Pictures," and troubling issues with a dangling chandelier in an opera house crop up in "Maskerade." Influences could come from Clint Eastwood to the French revolution to Shakespeare: "Wyrd Sisters" re-tells a melange of "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" from the point of view of three dissimilar, contrarian, yet down-to-earth witches.

But a reader needn't "pick up a stick and beat it to death with interpretation," Barton said. "The fantasy almost has to be that: You can get away with this sort of hyperbolic setting, more than they could be in a literal, real universe."

Some first came to Pratchett via "Good Omens," a 1990 novel of an almost-apocalypse, co-written with Neil Gaiman, a best-seller seemingly forever in the process of becoming a film, once with Terry Gilliam attached as director. After Pratchett's death, Gaiman wrote that his friend was not the "jolly old elf" some perceived. Righteous anger drove him, and he had a dislike for a world rarely, if ever, fair, Gaiman said.

"Terry's authorial voice is always Terry's: genial, informed, sensible, dryly amused," Gaiman wrote. ..."But beneath any jollity there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise. He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity."

Barton used Gaiman's elegy as an introduction for the class. "It's almost like he knew what I was going for," she said.

They're also looking at recurring, developing characters. Pratchett drew Sam Vimes close to his heart, a gutter-poor child who grew up with fists, knees and elbows in the mean streets. Through unbending will and innate decency, Sam rises to command the watch, and become Duke of Ankh-Morpork, a bluntly honest antithesis to the effete, the snobs and white-collar criminals. Asked "Quis custodies ipsos custodes?" (Who watches the watchmen?) he responds simply: "Me." Well, who watches Vimes? "I do that too. All the time."

"Vimes resists classicism, resists superiority," Barton said. "If you want to make who you are, you have to put your boots on and walk the streets. You have to, as he does in 'Night Watch,' create yourself."

Other texts they'll study include novels "Thud," "Making Money" and "Raising Steam."

"I really struggled, narrowing it down," Barton said. "If I could give them the time, I'd have them read a book a day, because it doesn't feel like a chore."

"He's funny, but above all he's against injustice. There's a lot of humor in Discworld, but there are also things that are just wrong and stupid."

Pratchett wrote to put them right.

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Source: https://www.tuscaloosanews.com/story/news/2016/05/15/university-of-alabama-interim-course-looks-at-fantasy-author-terry-pratchett/29977733007/

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