fairy tales

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Proposal for the Young Folklorists Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania

January 7, 2012 in Fairy Tales | No comments

Here is the CFP for the International Conference of Young Folklorists, “Theoretical Frames and Empirical Research,” that will take place in Vilnius, April 15-17, 2012. I’ll still be a visiting Ph.D. student in Tartu, Estonia at that time, and it’s only, hm, an 8-hour bus ride or so, so I’m in!

I’m really excited about the topic, because it’s something I tackle in my dissertation. To that end, I came up with a paper proposal (with an unwieldy but descriptive title, sigh) that I’d like to share:

Where the Empirical Meets the Theoretical: Merging Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Fairy Tales

Culture is patterned—so numbers and relationships between them matter—but culture is also multilayered, complex, symbolic, and subjectively experienced. Because culture, and especially expressive culture, can both be measured and felt, our research needs to incorporate both. In this paper, I explore how quantitative and qualitative approaches to fairy tales best help illuminate their various meanings. Drawing examples from my doctoral work on gender and the body in classical European fairy tales, I demonstrate how shifting between theoretical and empirical lenses enhances the research process.

The international tale type ATU 516, “Faithful John,” provides an excellent case study for an analysis that utilizes the intersection of empirical and theoretical frames. “Faithful John” is a highly canonical fairy tale with a male protagonist, appearing in classical collections such as Basile and the Grimms as well as ethnographic collections from various Indo-European-speaking regions and beyond. By counting the body nouns and adjectives that appeared in four versions of the tale, I was able to empirically ground an interpretation that was also theoretically informed by feminist theory, masculinity studies, and folkloristics. Additionally, I moved between close and distant readings of the texts, drawing insights from a broad study of men’s bodies in 233 tales, and then applying those findings to the narrower sample of ATU 516 texts discussed in this case study. Ultimately, my goal is to show how folklorists can benefit from combining quantitative and qualitative interpretive methods, fusing the empirical and the theoretical in our research regardless of the topic.

Thoughts?

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A Bit about Dualism

January 5, 2012 in Fairy Tales, Gender & Sexuality | 4 comments

Now that I’ve finished my dissertation, I feel that I can begin to blog in earnest.

Yes, it’s only a first draft, and yes, no doubt there’ll be revisions, but getting all those words down on the page was an important step in ushering in the beginning of the end. And even though I have academic papers to be writing for conferences and publications, having a first draft done frees up a lot of mental and creative energy for this kind of writing.

I’ve always loved writing. Yet I find myself strangely hesitant to commit words to paper in this blog. It’s taken a bit of pushing to get myself to make this first post-dissertation post. Reminding myself that writing is something I do whether I’m publishing it or not has helped. Reminding myself that this isn’t writing for a grade or for an editor has also helped – this blog is my venue to share my thoughts (scholarly for the most part) with the rest of the world. Reading this irreverently funny blog post 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing has also helped give me the kick in the pants I need to start committing words to the screen NOW instead of the day after tomorrow.

So, since I mentioned finishing my dissertation at the outset of this post, I wanted to briefly discuss one of the issues to which I devote a full chapter of my diss: dualism. I explain what dualism is over at MySexProfessor.com, linking it to gender identity and sexual stereotypes, but there’s a lot more to be said about dualism.

In particular, I’m really fascinated by mind-body dualism, especially its gendered dimensions (in most  Western philosophical constructions, men=mind while women=body). I found evidence for this in my study of classical fairy tales, in which women were more likely to be linked with body description adjectives, particularly those evaluating beauty and those having to do with skin, while men are more likely to shed their bodies through physical transformations in the tales I evaluated. It seems clear to me that fairy tales contain elements of gendered mind-body dualism, and this is possibly one reason for the enduring popularity of fairy tales in the West: they reinforce existing cultural paradigms, and are thus perceived as important and pleasing.

There’s probably more I could’ve done with dualism in my dissertation, but I really had to wrap the thing up at some point. I would, however, like to see more research done on gendered dimensions of dualism in the future. For example, @kinseyinstitute linked to this article on placebos, which gives a number of instances in which the “mind over matter” attitude works wonders. Some of these cases studies were gender-specific, as when “Fertility rates have been found to improve in women getting a placebo, perhaps because they experience a decrease in stress.” I would be really curious to know how placebos hold up when filtered by gender, since they represent such an interesting aspect of the mind-body relationship; do placebos tend to work better for men or women under certain circumstances? Does it matter whether women perceived themselves as more embodied than men do, according to dualistic doctrine? Or is gender not even a factor in the effectiveness of placebos? Perhaps dualisms are prevalent in some elements of our lives, but not others?

Anyway, hopefully this is the first of many blog posts to come. We’ll see if I can maintain momentum!

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Hello Blog! Let’s Talk about Fairy Tales!

October 19, 2011 in Fairy Tales | 7 comments

I’ve been meaning to start and maintain my own blog for, hm, a year and a half now, but I’ve been busy writing my dissertation, moving to Estonia, and the like. Better late than never, eh? Since I write specifically about sex and gender over at MySexProfessor.com I thought I’d go for more folklore content here, though I’ll also discuss feminist issues when the mood strikes me. Same goes for topics related to the digital humanities, food, travel, dancing, and all those other things that have captured my interest.

For this post, I thought I’d revisit a lengthy answer I wrote up to a query: Where are today’s fairy tales? I composed this response while on a two-hour run (I think I was training for a marathon at the time?), and it’s meant for a popular audience rather than a folkloristic audience, but I think folklorists might find it interesting too.

What are today’s fairy tales? The short answer is that they’re much like fairy tales from earlier times–fictional, formulaic narratives concerned with magic objects, quests, and happily ever afters. However, today’s fairy tales differ largely in the forms they take, ranging from filmic and literary versions to the hypertextual and intertextual variants found on the internet.

The longer answer is that it depends on how one defines fairy tales. If you take “fairy tale” to mean a falsehood or lie (“oh, that’s just a fairy tale”), as the term is often used in vernacular English, then yeah, fairy tales are everywhere today. Or even if you take “fairy tale” to mean some sort of diverting narrative, or any kind of story, you could also make a case that they’re all over the place. However, folklorists prefer a narrower definition of the genre of fairy tales, which I’ll explain briefly, using some of the main criteria of genre definitions: content, structure, context, style, and function.

In terms of content, fairy tales are filled with encounters with the magical, the marvelous, and the numinous; characters encounter fairy godmothers and dragons, magic rings and flying horses. Yet fairy tales also partake of human society, since characters are situated in kinship networks and kingdoms with rulers. In the encounters between the otherworldly and the mundane, fairy-tale characters grow and transform, metamorphosing from youth to adult, from low-status to high-status, and from single to married.

This point leads me to structure: almost all fairy tales have the same patterns in plot, the same way of stringing together sequences of action in the narrative. Most tales begin with a disturbance that leads to the fracturing of the nuclear family, an evil act or villainy, or alternately a wish or lack that must be fulfilled. Through encounters with helper figures, journeys to other places, tasks completed, obstacles navigated, and villains defeated, the protagonists emerge as competent adults who marry and rule. Plot episodes may be repeated, usually three times, as three is the “magic number” in Indo-European culture groups.

The contexts in which fairy tales are transmitted occupy a spectrum from oral performance to literature. Fairy tales are generally considered more literary in nature, while folktales are more oral and traditional (other genres of folktale include animal tales, fables, and jokes). Folktales were just as often intended for adults as for children in European tale-telling traditions, though this trend is only recently reemerging in English-speaking countries, with the numerous “fairy tales for adults” collections (some of which deal with mature content, drawing out the sex and violence implicit in so many sanitized fairy tales, others of which are explicitly erotic).

Fairy tales have a distinctive style that tends toward simplicity and abstraction (Swiss folklorist Max Luthi has written extensively on this topic). In English we recognize many linguistic markers of fairy tales: once upon a time, happily ever after, as golden as the sun, and so on. Fairy tales speak in metaphors, and as such, their language tends to favor extremes (not just black, but black as a raven’s feather), symmetry, and synecdoche.

Finally, we get to function. As marvelously entertaining as fairy tales are–think of Scheherezade, spinning tales to save her life for one thousand and one nights–they are not mere entertainment. No item of folklore, however amusing, fun, or pretty to look at or listen to, is just that. Fairy tales not only entertain, they also educate about and inculcate social values (for instance, in many of the “classical” fairy tales, girls are rewarded for being passive, pretty, and domestic, while boys win kingdoms through violence and warfare). Fairy tales provide a release, an outlet, a means of critiquing the dominant power structures, but at the same time, they provide escapism and wish fulfillment. They reflect the values of whatever culture they are adapted to, and can be regarded as documents that always partake of the sociohistorical as well as the symbolic. Fairy tales, like all folklore genres, are at once cultural and individual: the traditional plots, themes, and motifs are resources that individual narrators can utilize and manipulate to voice their own concerns, questions, criticisms. As such, fairy tales, like all art, can be therapeutic, and can reach and resonate with almost anyone.

So, where are today’s fairy tales? In some sense, where they’ve always been: in printed collections, but also circulating in oral tradition through variants. Folklorists are still recording the tales told by traditional narrators in cultures with a thriving oral tradition, in the Ozarks, in Palestine, in Greece; and then there’s the storytelling revival, with professional storytelling workshops, festivals, and conferences all around Northern America. Today’s fairy tales are also increasingly commodified by the mass media, though I think that films like Shrek 2 and Enchanted tell us more about the capitalist worldview than about the paradigms of the individuals who make them. Whether you call them postmodern fairy tales, fairy tale pastiches, or contemporary fairy tales, there is a thriving literary tradition, led by writers and editors such as Jane Yolen, Teri Windling, Ellen Kushner, and so on, with other important contributors like Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, and A. S. Byatt stretching back for decades.

Ultimately, I do not mean to disparage anyone’s definition of fairy tales; rather, my point is that those of us in fairy tale studies have a fairly nuanced perspective to contribute to the discussion. We in folklore trace our intellectual heritage back to the Grimm brothers and earlier. We’ve had this long to develop terms, tools, and theories for the study of folk narrative, always having to account for cultural change and the effects of new technology, so I think we can and should fruitfully converse with others who are interested in fairy tales. What do you think?

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