Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Echoes of the Past, Reflections of the Present

GENED 1197 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

What do fairy tales reveal about universal human experiences such as birth, death, love, jealousy, discrimination, dreams, growth, resilience, and empowerment?

We all tell stories, adapting them to reflect our values and making them relevant to our times. By analyzing texts from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s influential collection Children’s and Household Tales, comparing them to similar fairy tales from other cultures, and examining the contributions of visual artists to these transformations, we will explore pressing human questions such as love and desire, infertility and procreation, trust and betrayal, hunger and abundance, parental guidance and child abuse, and the discriminatory practices embedded in these texts, and demonstrate the universality and particularity of such stories and their impact on society at large. By the end of this course, you will have a thorough understanding of fairy tale archetypes and plot structures, various scholarly perspectives on these tales, an awareness of intertextuality, and the ability to analyze stories with multiple layers of meaning. You will also be able to reassess how you and those around you tell stories.