Read an Excerpt
New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales
By Christa C. Jones, Claudia Schwabe University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-481-2
CHAPTER 1
Fairy Tales, Myth, and Fantasy
CHRISTINA PHILLIPS MATTSON AND MARIA TATAR
The course "Fairy Tales, Myth, and Fantasy Literature" takes up the study of foundational stories from the childhood of culture and also from the culture of childhood. It tracks how narratives are recycled as they migrate into new media and old — how the story of Demeter and Persephone, for example, shows up in J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan or how "Little Red Riding Hood" is refashioned in contemporary films ranging from David Slade's Hard Candy (2005) to Joe Wright's Hanna (2011). It seeks to dismantle the divide between what we read to children and what we read as adults by constructing networks of storytelling cultures that intersect and overlap. Its focus is on both ethics and aesthetics, showing how counterfactuals and the construction of alluring Other Worlds challenge us to think harder and to connect with others through conversations and debate about what could be, should be, or ought to be.
Tolkien told us long ago that the cauldron of story has "always been boiling, and to it have continually been added bits, dainty and undainty" (Tolkien 1966, 32). For him, story is one thick brew — flavorful, zesty, and aromatic, with a wide range of ingredients, refined and unrefined. Tolkien's statement captures the dainty, or aesthetically pleasing, elements of stories as well as the undainty coarseness, crude grotesqueries, and over-the-top violence in them. We always borrow a phrase from Philip Pullman to warn our students that what they see will "shock and startle" them, and we advise them to fasten their seat belts for a (somewhat) bumpy ride (Pullman 2000, 710). The metaphors we use are chosen with a purpose. The stories we read make direct visceral hits, evoking a somatic response in many cases, but they also animate us, crying out for critical analysis that will enable us to understand exactly what moves us in the words used to tell tales. This course promotes bifocal vision as students probe the manifest content of texts and also begin to discover latent meanings.
Our course draws undergraduate students from all levels and many different majors at a liberal arts university. One of the first challenges facing us as teachers was to train our students in the art of analyzing print materials derived from oral traditions as well as in the craft of interpreting literary texts. We use the tools of close reading, discourse analysis, and poetics in both domains, but we also introduce students to Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis of myth as well as to Vladimir Propp's morphology of the folktale, along with the work of other cultural critics, anthropologists, and linguists working in the field of folklore.
Many of our students are familiar with Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories and recall the description in that book of "The Ocean of the Streams of Story," which is also known as the "biggest library in the universe." There they learned about oral traditions held "in fluid form" that retain the ability "to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories" (72). Rather than a stable text and artifact — a library of books — the ocean of the Streams of Story is magically alive, "a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity" (Rushdie 1991, 72). The passages from Rushdie's novel give students a platform for meditating on the various metaphors we use for stories (kaleidoscopes, carpets, yarns, tapestries, soups, and so on) and their component parts (threads, strands, tropes, memes, and motifs).
Students quickly discover that tales from the culture of childhood have a mythical power and are more than "just" nursery stories or old wives' tales. Little Red Riding Hood picks flowers in a meadow, much like Europa and Persephone before their abductions. The mythical Atreus and Thyestes haunt the Grimms' "This Juniper Tree" (Tatar 1998). And the giant in "Tom Thumb," who mistakenly eats his seven daughters, can be seen as a folkloric analogue to Kronos, who devours his own children. As Italo Calvino tells us: "Through the forest of fairy-tale, the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of the wind" (Calvino 1986, 18).
"All versions belong to the myth," Lévi-Strauss tells us, and this course tries to show how the multiforms of folklore and mythology enable us to use a wide lens in analyzing cultural stories (Lévi-Strauss 1963, I: 217). If fairy tales miniaturize myth and make it up close and personal, fantasy literature aspires to create new mythologies that rival the old. Fantasy opens up other worlds, secondary worlds, offering what Susan Cooper calls "magnificent bubbles" (Nel and Pau 2011, 83) marked by beauty but invoking also horror and dread. We explore a range of Wonder Worlds: Wonderland, Neverland, Narnia, Hogwarts, along with Philip Pullman's multiverses. The make-believe operations of these worlds do the work of mythopoesis, making beliefs and using the tropes of prophecy, miracle, revelation, and transformation in their fictional elaborations.
Fairy tales and fantasy literature have often been positioned as escapist. But they are less a way out than a way in, an escape into perils and possibilities. Moving in the optative mode, they tell us how things might be, should be, could be, or ought to be. These stories give us the great "what ifs?" and they introduce students to hypotheticals, giving them worlds that may not be real yet also characters who shape their identities in much the same way as people do in real life. They have what Paul Ricœur refers to as ontological vehemence, and what Dumbledore affirms in a head-spinning, self-reflexive moment in the Harry Potter series, as having the same status as reality (Ricœur 1981, 76). "Of course it is happening inside your head," he tells Harry. "But why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" (Rowling 2007, 723). We are after all still "on earth" as we read, witness, wonder, navigate, and explore with Harry and his companions.
In this course, we aim to promote what Tim Wynne-Jones calls the "deep-read," an immersive experience ("you get gut-hooked and dragged overboard down and down through the maze of print") that begins by seizing hold of us and then letting us go, enabling us to read and think between the lines, "where you are fleetingly aware of your own mind at work" (Wynne-Jones 1998, 165–66). We take up the aesthetic pleasure of reading and explore cognitive gains (nothing challenges us more than making sense of Lewis Carroll's nonsense, for example), but we also consider reading as what Steven Pinker calls a moral technology, that is, a medium for exploring the minds of others, getting inside their skin, walking in their shoes, going inside their heads, and performing all the other strange empathetic acts that accompany our engagement with what are nothing more than black squiggles on a white page. Our students reward our efforts with attentive reading, understanding that many of these works enable them to go back in some way, yet also provide them with ignition power, the capacity to deepen and broaden their understanding of how we do things with words and narratives.
Our students often come to the course with a deeply personal relationship to the books we read, whether it is because their parents read them fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm at bedtime, or because they participated in a theatrical production of Peter Pan, or because they consider Harry Potter one of their most intimate friends. Consequently, we feel that we have a certain responsibility to keep alive the inventive enthusiasm they bring to the readings. Just as the experience of reading requires a collaboration between author and reader, so too the learning experience in the classroom can turn into a partnership between teachers and students. We all bring something to the narrative feast at our collective classroom table. And, what is more, we hope that what we read together becomes a moveable feast. We want our course to provoke, animate, and promote an appetite for stories. It is no accident that we begin our unit on fairy tales with the story about the girl in red and our unit on fantasy with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, encouraging our students to wander off the beaten path into terrain where success depends on their own inquisitiveness, creativity, and courage. As Neil Gaiman writes in The Ocean at the End of the Lane: "Children use back ways and hidden paths, adults take roads and official paths" (Gaiman 2013, 113). We try hard to regress to those childlike ways.
We begin the semester-long course with fairy tales and, at midterm, we turn to fantasy literature. The rationale for this organization is twofold: First, it makes good chronological sense to begin with tales once told by the fireside and then to progress to literary texts in order for the students to witness how plots, characters, themes, and tropes migrate from times past into the contemporary narratives we use to make sense of our lives. We envision the two parts to the course as a diptych: each section complements the other, and, when taken together, they illuminate each other and promote a better understanding of literary works that move in the mode of the marvelous and uncanny. Our second reason for dividing the term is to demonstrate that the inflection point at which oral turns to literary, fairy tale turns into novel, and myth turns into history is less of a sharp break than it seems.
In the first half of the course, we read a variety of tale types ("The Children and the Ogre," "The Animal as Bridegroom," "The Princess on the Glass Mountain," "The Name of the Supernatural Helper," and others) in order to build a foundation for identifying cultural discourses, character types, landscapes, and motifs in myth and fairy tale. This method permits students to recognize how those elements come to be recycled in later fantasy texts, and it also introduces them to the concept of intertextuality and the broader network of storytelling. During the first half of the term, along with our primary fairytale and mythological texts we include secondary readings comprising various excerpts and full-length essays written by influential scholars who created the foundation for studying folklore and mythology. Vladimir Propp, Philippe Ariés, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alan Dundes, Lewis Hyde, Bruno Bettelheim, and Robert Darnton offer a range of approaches to the material under consideration. We try to offer our students multiple perspectives on methodology so that they will emerge with a clear understanding of folkloristics as an academic discipline.
When we make the shift to fantasy literature, we position the narratives as part of a continuous category that requires examination from more than just the literary perspective. In the second half of the term, we read a number of novels and limit the amount of secondary material assigned, although we continue to challenge the students to develop an analytic apparatus for examining the stories by introducing new terminology, reading critical essays, and assigning excerpts from secondary sources. By employing this model we find that by the second half of the course, students are comfortable analyzing the primary and secondary texts that we assign without as much step-by-step guidance. As a result, they are able to generate class discussions and conduct their own independent investigations that form the basis of their final papers and projects.
We have found that the most effective pedagogical arrangement is to meet twice per week, once as a whole group for a formal lecture with the course instructor, and once in smaller groups for a discussion session with what our institution calls section leaders. In lecture, we offer an overview of the readings for the week and provide historical context, as well as background on how the tales have been analyzed and interpreted. We also present students with counterarguments to prevailing critical wisdom and encourage them to develop their own critical entry point through close readings of passages. In our unit on trickster narratives, for example, we introduce them to Lewis Hyde's study of male tricksters and note that he defines those figures in ways that exclude female counterparts. By examining tales like the German "Hansel and Gretel" and the Russian Baba Yaga tales like "Vasilisa the Fair," we try to identify a parallel tradition, showing how female figures develop a distinctive form of trickster identity, with a different set of priorities and domains of agency. In addition, through references to contemporary films, television programs, songs, visual culture, consumer products, and political satire, we show how these stories remain relevant and continue to build our social and cultural identities. In the second half of the term, we emphasize how the works we read figure as meaningful cultural touchstones. Whether looking at the critique of reality television and media violence in The Hunger Games or investigating the advocacy of reading and the promotion of social responsibility in Harry Potter, we work through the stories to discover how powerfully children's fantasy fiction mirrors our own cultural preoccupations and personal concerns. In lecture, we try to promote dialog as well as convey information. We give our students brief assignments each week to start them thinking about the material, and we encourage discussion through group brainstorming at the start of each lecture. For Peter Pan, for example, we asked students to bring to class three words to describe Neverland. For the unit on "Little Red Riding Hood," they came to class with one other version of the story they had encountered. "Who's your daemon?" we asked in the unit on The Golden Compass. We then continue the dialog initiated in lecture in section meetings and, in this way, we are able to dive right into discussion because the students are already engaged with the material.
Discussions in section are designed to help students navigate the secondary readings, to digest the content of lectures, and to explore the readings in a more informal environment. Given the size of the course (approximately thirty to thirty-five students), it is impossible for every student to participate in lecture. Section, which comprises a maximum of fifteen students, provides a more intimate space for questioning, debating, investigating, and digging deeper. We keep students engaged and enthusiastic about the material by providing some space for personal reactions and observations, but we also seek to provide a foundational understanding of folklore and fairy tales as well as interpretive tools for approaching children's fantasy literature. We are aware that students often choose our course over others because they imagine that it will be "fun" and "easy." As we tell our students, the stories we read in the course represent the simple expression of complex thought, and they are often more challenging to interpret than texts that seem to lend themselves more readily, on the surface of things, to decoding. We have discovered that we do not have to sacrifice rigor for pleasure, or vice versa. We maintain a high standard of critical thinking for our students and try to show how rereading stories from their own childhoods through a critical lens can be intellectually challenging and revelatory. Because many of the assigned readings will be familiar to the students, our suggested strategy for other teachers of fairy tales and fantasy literature is to approach each unit from an unexpected angle in order to encourage a more active engagement with the texts. Whether participating in a mental scavenger hunt to identify fairy-tale motifs in "Hansel and Gretel," refereeing a "caucus race" to determine the figure with the greatest authority in Alice in Wonderland, conducting a mock trial for Bluebeard's wife to debate the ethics of her decision to enter the Bloody Chamber, or drawing daemons to identify Pullman's criteria for these physical manifestations of a character's soul, students discover that exercising their critical faculties in a playful manner can lead to more sophisticated insights about concepts ranging from Paul Ricœur's notion of ontological vehemence to Elaine Scarry's understanding of how writers create vivacity. Our students respond enthusiastically to these nontraditional types of discussions, and we find that these experiences in the classroom promote innovation in the students' own independent research, papers, and projects.
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Excerpted from New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales by Christa C. Jones, Claudia Schwabe. Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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