Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of selected works of children's literature from different periods and places. The works will be considered in relation to literary theory, and may be organized by different critical issues or approaches. Students with credit for ENGL 367 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Silk Road caravans . . . Middle Eastern bazaars . . . waterfront dives in Constantinople . . . pilgrim hostels in the Pyrenees . . . and a thousand humble firesides in every corner of medieval Europe, where villagers would gather round an aged storyteller for a winter's night of tales . . . such are the conduits through which our marvellously disparate and varied heritage of fairytales circulated, prior to the Renaissance when it started to occur to people to write such stories down.

We are going to approach the fairytale in contemporary culture from two historical vantage points. First, we'll look at the origins and evolution of folklore research as it developed from an amateur hobbyist's pursuit and source of literary experimentation into a methodical science, all in the context of an industrializing Europe where people felt increasingly nostalgic about the oral traditions that were slipping into oblivion all around them. Second, we'll look at how conceptualizations and social practices related to childhood were developing during the same period, and how sugary, denatured versions of fairytales were used to construct a literature appropriate to the supposed mental and moral needs of the Victorian child. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Andrew and Nora Lang, Lewis Carroll, and "Speranza" Wilde and her son, Oscar, will be among the nineteenth-century figures who will require our attention as we build up to our study of the fairytale in the age of Disney and Shrek, of Neil Gaiman and Hayao Miyazaki, of helicopter parenting and free range child-rearing.

We will also familiarize ourselves with the most influential ways of theorizing the fairytale--structuralist, psychoanalytical, feminist, etc. Our major focus will be on understanding the dialectic between changing interpretations of fairytales and changing views of childhood. Students' presentations and research papers will trace the journeys of a particular folkloric motif, selected by themselves, from oral tradition to contemporary popular culture.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

All readings will be posted to Canvas or placed on reserve in the Bennett Library.