Close Reading Cinderella
In this opening section of the course, we’ll read the Brothers Grimm’s “Aschenputtel†alongside Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella†to get a sense of the contours of the tale as it’s influenced Anglo-American culture. Guided in part by structural folklore studies (the Aarne-Thompson taxonomy and Vladimir’s Propp’s work), we’ll then use this context to understand the contribution of different versions of “Cinderella.â€
A Grimm Nation
We’ll then turn to early nineteenth-century Germany, the period during which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected and published the tales and the period during which Germany began to organize itself into a version of the politically unified nation we know today. Using the ideas of political scientists Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, we’ll think about how individual tales influence, complicate, or even subvert a dawning sense of German national identity and/or nationalism.
Victorian Fancies
From nineteenth-century Germany we’ll cross the Channel to Britain, where poets and novelists extended the Grimms preliminary efforts to bring fairy tales from the realm of the “folk†to that of the “literary†by inventing new ones. Each of you will investigate the context for a particular tale or set of tales from this period, doing independent research to learn about the Victorians and their fairy tales. We’ll use psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to help us understand some of the ways these literary texts reflect, respond to, and even challenge or subvert their cultural and ideological surroundings. You’ll present your research to the class in a formal presentation at the end of the semester.
Bloody Revisions
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is, some have argued, a radical feminist re-telling of several traditional fairy tales. Now experts in those tales, you’ll review such claims and Carter’s stories themselves.