scholarly journals Beauty and the Beast: The Value of Teaching Fairy Tales to University Students in the 21st Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Jane Beal

In this essay, I suggest that fairy tales have particular value for students studying at the university level. Assigning fairy tales allows students to read familiar stories from their childhood and reconsider them from critical perspectives. When teaching a college course on fairy tales, my students and I utilize three essential frameworks for understanding fairy tales, focusing on the psycho-social development and sexual maturation of the human person, feminist critique and the need for gender equality in a patriarchal world, and audience reception and reader responses leading to emotional progress and even spiritual enlightenment. Students primarily familiar with Disney film versions of fairy tales enlarge their understanding of multiple versions of tales, both early modern and contemporary. They become familiar with classic fairy tale writers and collectors, such as Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, and J.K. Rowling as well as fairy tale scholars like Bruno Bettelheim, Maria Tartar, and Jack Zipes. Their study not only results in a firm grasp of the key aspects of story in general, but in the ability to see connections between the real-world problems of the 21st century – such as poverty, starvation, disease, inequality, child abuse, human trafficking, and abuses of political power, among others – and lessons learned from fairy tales. This essay analyzes “Beauty and the Beast” as a key example of the genre and identifies pedagogical strategies for teaching it.

Author(s):  
Jack Zipes

This book explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. The book reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world—the fairy tale. Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. The book looks at the transformation of the Grimms' tales into children's literature, the Americanization of the tales, the “Grimm” aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales' utopian impulses. It shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. The book concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism. The book examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today's storytelling world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Rian Damariswara

ABSTRAKTokoh utama dalam dongeng Jawa Timur memiliki sisi lain yang perlu diungkap. Sisi lain tersebut, yakni kecakapan hidup yang dimiliki tokoh utama dalam menyelesaikan masalah yang dihadapinya. Kecakapan hidup tersebut, memiliki relevansi dengan kecakapan hidup di abad ke-21. Jadi, dengan menganalisis kecakapan hidup tokoh utama secara otomatis peneliti dan pembaca dapat mengetahui bahwa tokoh-tokoh dongeng yang terdapat di Jawa Timur memiliki budaya hidup yang baik untuk dijadikan contoh dan motivasi.Untuk mengungkap kecakapan hidup abad ke-21 pada tokoh utama dongeng Jawa Timur menggunakan kajian antropologi sastra.Penelitian ini termasuk deskriptif kualitatif. Sumber data adalah teks dongeng Jawa Timur. Teknik yang digunakan adalah studi dokumenter. Kecakapan hidup abad ke-21 yang ditemukan pada dongeng Jawa Timur sebagai berikut. Pertama, berpikir kritis dan pemecahan masalah. Semua tokoh utama dalam dongeng memiliki pemikiran kritis sehingga dapat memecahkan masalah. Kedua, kreativitas dan inovasi yang ditemukan yakni jenis pengembangan dan sintesis. Inovasi pengembangan yang ditemukan adalah adanya alat bajak sawah dari batu menjadi kayu dan ditarik sapi serta dapat dipergunakan sebagai sarana hiburan. Alat tersebut diberi nama karapan sapi.  Inovasi sintesis adalah menggabungkan segala sesuatu yang dimiliki untuk dijadikan sesuatu yang baru. Seperti pada dongeng Asal Mula Reog Ponorogo,yakni menggabungkan kepala tokoh Singabarong dengan burung merak sehingga dinamakan reog ponorogo. Ketiga, kolaborasi antaranggota dan pemimpin dengan bawahan. Keempat, komunikasi yakni berupa diskusi, pengarahan, berkeluh kesah, dan perintah.Kata kunci: Kecakapan hidup abad ke-21, Tokoh utama, DongengABSTRACTThe main character in the East Java fable has another side that needs to be revealed. The other side, namely the life skills possessed by the main character in solving the problems they face. Life skills, have relevance to 21st century life skills. Therefore, by analyzing the life skills of the main characters automatically the researcher and reader can find out that the fairy tale figures in East Java which have a good life culture to be used as an example and motivation. To uncover 21st century life skills in the main characters of the East Javanese fable, the study of literary anthropology is used. This research is descriptive qualitative. The data source is the text of a fairy tale in East Java. The technique used is documentary study. The 21st century life skills found in the East Java fable are as follows. First, critical thinking and problem solving. All the main characters in fairy tales have critical thinking so they can solve problems. Second, the creativity and innovation found are types of development and synthesis. Development innovation that was found was the existence of a rice plow from stone to wood and pulled by cows and could be used as a means of entertainment. The tool is named Karapan Sapi. Synthesis of innovation is to combine everything that is owned to be something new. As in the fable of Reog Ponorogo, which combines the head of the Singabarong character with a peacock so it is called Reog Ponorogo. Third, collaboration between members and leaders with subordinates. Fourth, communication in the form of discussion, direction, complaints, and orders.Keyword: 21st century life skills, The main character, Fairy tale


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Emma Louise Parfitt ◽  
Emine Erdoğan ◽  
Heidi Fritz ◽  
Peter M. Ward ◽  
Emma Parfitt ◽  
...  

The conversation piece is the product of a group interview with Professor Jack Zipes and provides useful insights about publishing for early career researchers across disciplines. Based on his wider experiences as academic and writer, Professor Zipes answered questions from PhD researchers about: writing books, monographs and edited collections; turning a PhD thesis into a monograph; choosing and approaching publishers; and the advantages of editing books and translations. It presents some general advice for writing and publishing aimed at postgraduate students. Professor Zipes is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, United States, a world expert on fairy tales and storytelling highlighting the social and historical dimensions of them. Zipes has forty years of experience publishing academic and mass-market books, editing anthologies, and translating work from French, German and Italian. His best known books are Breaking the Magic Spell (1979), Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (1983), The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (2012), and The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (2014).


Author(s):  
LAURA DAVIS

  The story of Beauty and her beast is truly a tale as old as time: a beautiful girl falls in love with a beast and her love transforms him into a prince. This project is framed by Joosen’s (2011) argument regarding fairy tale retellings disrupting Jauss and Benzinger’s (1970) claim that fairy tales and retellings align with the horizon of expectations. Using Kemmerer’s A Curse so Dark and Lonely (2019), a “Beauty and the Beast” retelling, this essay tests Joosen’s (2011) theory to determine if the retelling remains true to or diverges from the original parent material. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 127-132
Author(s):  
Myriam Ávila

Resumo: É a certeza de que nada mais – ou nada importante – pode acontecer após o final de um conto que permite o acontecimento da catarse. Se na maioria das narrativas existe algum tipo de dénouement, em algumas delas isso acontece de maneira especialmente satisfatória e afirmativa. O conto de fadas é uma dessas formas narrativas onde o efeito catártico é extremo e preenche objetivos específicos, de acordo com Bruno Bettelheim. Hollywood mimetizou essa forma como estratégia de sedução, iniciando a tradição do final feliz no cinema. A partir do conto de fadas Cinderela, em diferentes versões, juntamente com a animação homônima da Disney e ainda duas versões do filme Sabrina, será traçada aqui uma relação entre a catarse e o final feliz nos contos de fada, bem como seu uso pela indústria cultural.Palavras-chave: catarse; contos de fada; Hollywood.Abstract: It is the certainty that nothing else – or nothing important – can happen after the closing of a tale that allows catharsis to take place. If in most narratives there is a kind of dénouement, in some forms it will be specially satisfactory and reassuring. The fairy tale is one of those forms in which the cathartic effect is uppermost and fulfills specific aims, according to Bruno Bettelheim. The Hollywood movie mimetized its form as strategy of seduction, starting the tradition of the happy end in film. Taking as a model the fairy tale “Cinderella” in different versions, along with Disney’s homonimous animation and two versions of the film “Sabrina”, a relation will be traced here between catharsis and happy end in fairy tales and its use in the cultural industry.Keywords: catharsis; fairy tales; Hollywood.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2 (18)) ◽  
pp. 116-125
Author(s):  
Vicky Tchaparian

Although Brothers Grimm collection of fairy tales have somehow the same cliché of plot, setting, and characters, in the fairy tale of Shrek the protagonist doesn’t follow this cliché. Shrek the protagonist is not a classical fairy tale of the handsome prince in quest of a beautiful princess; instead, he is an ogre. Grimm brothers wrote on text that they collected from the words of mouth giving the traditional tales a special structure and characters. However, compared to Grimm Brothers’ tales, Shrek the film, has a completely different structure and characters. In this paper I try to disclose the fact that Grimm folk tales which reveal the mentality of the 19th century as well as that of the earlier ages that belong to specific cultures (especially to the European culture and their mentality) are completely different than that of Shrek the film.


Author(s):  
Elena Ortells Montón

The main aim of this study is to explore if, and if so, how Rabih Alameddine, Kim Addonizio, and Kellie Wells have managed to sustain, replicate, disregard, or redefine the patriarchal ideology customarily associated to gender issues within the fairy-tale tradition. What is really striking is that, several decades after the revisionist project undertaken by the "Angela Carter generation", these new voices experimenting with the field of fairy tales still feel the need to revisit the same mythemes and fight against the same ideology and values that pervaded twentieth century retellings of fairy tales. The subversive potential of the fairy tale retellings seems to have been surpassed by the powerful agenda of a patriarchal social system, which, despite the social, psychological and political changes, still retains its status quo.


2021 ◽  
Vol 122 ◽  
pp. 06006
Author(s):  
Liudmila A. Mirskaya ◽  
Victor O. Pigulevskiy

Psychologists often use the name of the protagonist of the fairy tale “Cinderella”, which is famous thanks to the brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, for a sacrificial girl prone to dissociation, illusions, and waiting for a prince. This is typical for psychoanalysis. However, such an idea of Cinderella’s character does not fully reflect the essence of the matter. Moreover, it is generally not true. From the perspective of C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology, Cinderella is not a victim or an infantile dreamer and is not a real girl at all. Any tale represents an archetypal process of individuation. This is a collective natural constant of the psyche that excludes individual problems. Cinderella cultivated in herself what the ancient Greeks called “paideia” – the integrity of the personality and inner strength, influence on others. The purpose of the article is to describe the process of Cinderella’s individualization from the position of C.G. Jung’s archetypal approach based on the amplification method. The most relevant sources of recent years on the archetypal analysis of fairy tales are the works by M.-L. von Franz, H. Dieckmann, and C.P. Estés. The novelty of the study consists in the description and analysis of the archetypal images of the collective unconscious, which underlie the process of Cinderella’s individuation and determine her life path. These archetypal images are Persona, Self, Shadow, Anima/Animus, and the symbolic levels of the individuation process can be represented by such alchemical terms as “separation”, “multiplication”, “calcination”, “initiation”, “transformation”, “conjunction”, “solidification”. The levels testify to the character’s inner transformation and, as a result, lead to a happy woman’s destiny. The result of understanding the deep essence of the tale is a psychologist’s analytical work with modern young women, which will lead to positive changes in thinking and behavior.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (194) ◽  
pp. 172-176
Author(s):  
Svitlana Fedotova ◽  

The peculiarities of a reading at out-of-school hours «defense of a reader’s diary» lesson in the primary school are being considered in the given article on the material of some folk and literary fairy-tales by Sh. Perrault, brothers Grimm, H. Ch. Andersen. A lesson-defense of a reader’s diary is a lesson, based on the work in small groups. It is constructed by means of a self-questioning method according to the material of the fairy-tales, which have been read, and by means of the assessment of other students’ work. A lesson-defense of the reader’s diary is an extremely interesting and efficient type of work, aimed at the development of critical thinking, children’s creative imagination, forming their independent and conscious reading. In advance (a month earlier) the students are given a task, for example, to read some Ukrainian folk fairy-tales of the fairy-tales by Sh. Perrault, brothers Grimm, H. Ch. Andersen and to fill in independently the following columns of a reader’s diary: 1) a column «Author»; 2) a column «Title of the work {a collection, a fairy-tale}; 3) a column «Characters of the fairy-tale»; 4) a column «Questions to the text»; 5) a column «Tricky» questions. The questions to the text presuppose three levels: The questions of the first level begin with the words: Who? What? Where? When? How? Which? These are the questions, aimed at giving some information about who the main character is, where the action is taking place, when the action is taking place. The questions of the second level are aimed at the causal relationships and that is why they begin with the word: Why? The questions of the third level are aimed at clarification of the meaning of the words and expressions, which are difficult for understanding. Forming «tricky questions» is a creative task for the primary school students. «Tricky» questions are the questions aimed at prognostication of the character’s further fate or the further possible development of the events of the fairy-tale’s plot. The readers can create some interesting and wise «tricky» questions, if they compare the logics of a fairy-tale and the logics of the real life. In the process of work at the reader’s diary and its defense the students can consciously and deeply comprehend the content of a tale, think over the fairy tale’s logics, compare it with the real life logics. That would form their attention and instill love to the magic world and word of a fairy-tale.


2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (29) ◽  
pp. 194-202
Author(s):  
Eleonora Lassan

This article focuses on one of the most popular plots in fairy tale culture (the plot involving the protagonist Tom Thumb), and tries to explain this popularity through the cultural archetypes that are expressed in the fairy tale. The author analyzes fairy tales of different nations involving this particular character and draws a boundary between the literary fairy tale, which is a transformation of old French fairy tales written by Charles Perrault, and different variations of literary fairy tale written by the brothers Grimm. The research shows that it is impossible to apply Propp’s method, which allows the plot to be analyzed in regard to functions and character types, to the analysis of this fairy tale. The author assumes that the fairy tale about Tom Thumb may not be regarded as magic for various reasons. On the other hand, it may be treated as an animal tale, which in Propp’s approach is assumed to have a different structure from a magic fairy tale. The researcher draws a conclusion about the different archetypes that serve as the basis for Perrault’s literary fairy tales, and the numerous variations of the plot which we may relatively denominate as “Grimms’ plot.” Furthermore, in folk tales having Grimms’ plot, Tom Thumb simultaneously performs the role of cultural hero and the role of a trickster. This is absent from Perrault’s fairy tale, because the propaganda of moral values and a distinct didactic character are traditional features of French fairy tales.


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