Postmodern Fairy Tales - Einzelansicht

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Telling fairy tales has been considered a "domestic art" at least since Plato in the Gorgias referred to the "old wives' tales" told by nurses to amuse and to frighten children. While this association has not done much to enhance the status of these cultural stories,  fairy tales belong to the most powerfully formative tales in any cultur. Moreover, their post/modern mass-medial adaptation in film and graphic narrative has significantly enhanced the staying power of these stories and their widespread and enduring popularity. All this suggests that fairy tales must be addressing issues that have a significant social function—whether critical, conservative, compensatory, or therapeutic: In that perspective, fairy tales register an effort on the part of both children and adults, women and men, to develop maps for coping with personal anxieties, family conflicts, social frictions, and the myriad frustrations of everyday life. No surprise, then, that contemporary literatures in the Anglophone world should abound with revisions, reworkings and rewritings of traditional folk and fairy tales.

This lecture course will combine theory-based discussions of the genre of the fairy tale with in-depth readings of exemplary and influential contemporary fairy tales including, among others, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch, Angela Carter’s and Jeanette Winterson’s feminist rewritings of the Grimm Brothers’ tales, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.

A reader with recommended reading will be made available on Moodle.

Compulsory reading for the final in-class exam include excerpts from

* Cristina Baccilega, Postmodern Fairy Tales

* Kevin Paul Smith, The Postmodern Fairy Tale

* Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch

* Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

3 CP for regular attendance and in-class exam.