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- Convenors:
-
Francisco Vaz da Silva
(ISCTE-IUL)
Donald Haase (Wayne State University)
- Chair:
-
Cristina Bacchilega
(University of Hawaii-Manoa)
- Stream:
- Narrative
- Location:
- A225
Short Abstract:
This panel takes the productive tension between heritage and utopia to discuss scholarly tales on fairy tales. On the heritage side, we ask: What sorts of tales about fairy tales have been accepted? On the utopian side, we challenge participants to spell out their own tacit assumptions and agendas.
Long Abstract:
This panel proposes a particular angle on the general issue of how utopian visions and heritages materialize. Fairy tales, while being a crucial component of heritage, have been deemed a utopian genre (by, e.g., Jack Zipes). This panel proposes to take the same productive tension between heritage and utopia to discuss scholarly tales on fairy tales. On the heritage side of our probe, we ask: For what purposes have scholars been using fairy tales? What sorts of tales about fairy tales have been accepted, what kinds have been dismissed? On the utopian side, we would challenge practicing fairy-tale scholars to explain the benefits of their approaches, and to specify the potential convergences and synergies with other points of view. We would wish practicing scholars to spell out their assumptions as fully as possible for the benefit of each other, and to discuss those assumptions and the scholar's own intellectual heritage so as to get some clarity -- and, hopefully, some cross-pollination -- in the field. Our utopian vision for this panel would be to build a discussion in which scholars would point out the limitations of their own approaches and would seek out the benefits of hearing out their peers' meta-tales.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Cristina Bacchilega (University of Hawaii-Manoa)
Paper short abstract:
"The truth about stories is that that's all we are" (Thomas King 2003). This apparently simple truth also holds for scholarly disciplines or cultures, and thus reflecting critically on it as scholars of fairy-tale studies has the potential for changing who we think we have been and want to be.
Paper long abstract:
As Cherokee writer Thomas King affirmed, "the truth about stories is that that's all we are." This apparently simple truth also holds for scholarly cultures, and thus reflecting critically on it as scholars of fairy-tale studies has the potential for changing who we are, or at least who we think we have been and want to be. The stories we tell about recurrence—as pattern and event—are my focus here. While representing different kinds of scientific imagination, Antti Aarne's and Stith Thompson's "tale type" classification, Vladimir Propp's Morphology, and the Freudian exploration of the unconscious in fairy tales all sought to codify and verify the meaning-production of widely diverse narratives in systematic ways that foreground the workings of structure in experience. Today's phylogenetic studies of folktales' cross-cultural relationships seem to rest on a similarly structural framework. If so, what does their return suggest about anxieties in the field of folk and fairy-tale studies? I don't have an answer, but I believe that some speculative fictions point to different pathways for scholars to approach the retelling and proliferation of wonder tales, offering a counter-knowledge to evolutionary models by foregrounding the embodied, affective, and performative aspects of recurrence. The impulse moving my discussion is to insist on the situatedness of stories in a worldly web and foreground interconnectedness.
Judit Gulyás (Institute of Ethnology)
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents discourses formed about fairy tales in Hungarian culture. It provides an overview about the change of values and meanings assigned to a selected genre of oral tradition to legitimize in various ideological contexts the subject matter of research, the researchers and the discipline.
Paper long abstract:
The valorization of fairy tales in Hungarian elite culture began in the middle of the 19th century. Previously fairy tales had been considered as a narrative genre of idle entertainment used by children, women and peasants/maids, in short, by persons excluded from elite culture. The narration of fairy tales was assigned to popular culture, but by adding value and lending self-transcending significance to this genre, the study of tales could become a legitimate passion for men of letters, a scholarly engagement that got institutionalized in the form of folklore studies. The history of valorization created various, sometimes conflicting or overlapping discourses. Fairy tale, thus, was understood in the framework of nationalism as a palimpsest providing an insight into pre-Christian myths and beliefs of the nation, as a narrative inventory for the creation of national children's literature, as a supplementary oral narrative form that may offer techniques, themes and motifs for the literary re-creation of the eagerly sought-for, still missing, national heroic epic. In the 20th century, in compliance with changing political setting, to underline the nation's perceived loneliness in the middle of Europe, the Oriental/Asian cultural heritage preserved in fairy tales was sought for, while in the Socialist era fairy tale was presented as a revolutionary genre of wish-fulfillment of the exploited classes.
Nemanja Radulovic (Faculty of Philology, Belgrade University)
Paper short abstract:
The very idea of finding the ultimate source of fairy-tale is utopic; and different answers to the question reveal different cultural heritages of the national scholarships.
Paper long abstract:
While it has seemed that after the Structuralism the question of fairy-tale origins lost importance it had had in 19th century, we are on the contary witnesses of revived interest in the sources of the genre. Answers offered display a surprising diversity from quite opposite methodological standpoints. On one hand, so-called "new genealogical method" claims to discovery of the genre's origin in modern time and in print culture, reviving thus Gesunkeneskulturgut theory; on the other hand, there is a wave of neo-mythological approaches, especially in Slavic folkloristics, relying on Dumézil and Ivanov-Toporov theories. The very idea of finding the ultimate source of fairy-tale is utopic; and different answers to the question reveal different cultural heritages of the national scholarships.
Donald Haase (Wayne State University)
Paper short abstract:
Fairy-tale studies has become critically aware of its history. The stories of fairy-tale scholars reveals the motives, ideas and perceived stakes that shaped that history. I tell my own story by explaining the tensions among my intellectual background, the fairy tale and positions I have advocated.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary fairy-tale studies, which began to emerge in the 1970s, has entered a phase of self-reflection and critical awareness of its own history. Telling its story holds the potential to plot the field's general historical development and importance. Telling our individual stories as fairy-tale scholars can illuminate the motives, ideas, and perceived stakes that have contributed to that development and shaped the questions, contradictions, and controversies that have characterized the field. This paper tells my own story by explaining the role my intellectual background played in my fairy-tale scholarship over the last 30 years, how the fairy tale challenged and changed my critical assumptions and approach, how that scholarship has implicitly reflected the limitations and tensions of my before-and-after approaches, and how that internal conflict has moved toward resolution in contemporary fairy-tale scholarship invoking my work.
Weronika Kostecka (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
The author outlines her strategy of using fairy tales as a means of creating her image of a 'serious researcher'. In the Polish academia, this means shifting the perception of fairy tales: from literature for children to the text of culture, as well as rethinking such concept as heritage.
Paper long abstract:
It is a distinctive characteristic of Polish research to analyse fairy tales exclusively as literature directed at children, and to discuss such issues as their impact on children's emotional, moral and intellectual development. Interestingly, Polish scholars who focus on fairy tales are not considered 'serious researchers' - such assumption is popular among the representatives of other divisions of literature studies.
My research is founded on a certain paradox: I want to break the image of a 'not serious' scholar by researching fairy tales - understood as a text of culture, and not a children-targeted literature, as it has been established in Poland. I am mostly interested in literary and marketing strategies of 'returning' fairy tales to adults, as well as in the 'blank spaces' on a Polish fairy tale research map (those are, for example, reasons why do Polish feminists criticise traditional tales, but not create their own).
I will discuss:
1) the transformation within my own academic narrative on fairy tales - from fairy tales as literature for children (fairy tale as a didactic instrument), through fairy tale as children's literature (fairy tale and its retellings as a play with tradition and with readers), to fairy tales understood as a text of culture;
2) ways in which I use fairy tales to construct my image of a 'serious scholar';
3) evolution of my understanding of 'heritage' and 'utopia' in reference to fairy tales (from the 'researcher of Polish fairy tales' to the 'fairy tale researcher').
Francisco Vaz da Silva (ISCTE-IUL)
Paper short abstract:
I address why it is important to consider meanings in fairy tales, and the shortcomings of the available models. I revisit my own representation of fairy-tale symbolism over time and draw some lessons. And I pinpoint the soft spots of my present approach and wonder how to fix those.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I wish to address three points. First, I spell out why I think it is crucial to address meanings in fairy tales, and why I think there is room for improving the available models for doing so. Second, I revisit the evolution of my own representation of fairy-tale symbolism over time and mention a couple assumptions I have discarded along the way (acknowledging shortcomings is a splendid way to find a path forward). And third, I strive to pinpoint the soft spots of my present approach and try to imagine how to fix them, so as to progress towards devising a method that could be seamlessly shared by scholars interested in fairy-tale symbolism.
Romina Werth (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
While focusing on the Icelandic collection of legends and fairy tales by Jón Árnason, the aim of this paper is to get some clarity on who exactly the contributors of Icelandic folk- and fairy tales had been, who often did not fit the narrator stereotypes of old and illiterate tradition carriers.
Paper long abstract:
A widely accepted premise by folklorists is the assumption that the main fairy tale contributors had been old, poor and illiterate. The German Grimm-scholar Heinz Rölleke was one of the first who challenged these stereotypes by bringing forward his theory about old Marie and young Marie and by stating that young and educated women had been the main informants for Grimms' Household Tales. However, what kind of narrators contributed their stories to lesser known collections of folk- and fairy tales? Does it matter how the collections emerged and what kind of practices where used to collect the stories? The main focus of this paper lies on the Icelandic collection of legends and fairy tales by Jón Árnason. For the most part Jón Árnason relied on a great number of collectors, most often priests, around the country who used their social networks for accessing and collecting stories. It is in these networks where the main contributors of Icelandic folk- and fairy tales where to be found and who surprisingly often did not fit the picture of the narrator prototype as introduced by the brothers Grimm and other folklorists. By the end, this paper hopes to have shown how Jón Árnason and his helpers used their sources and who exactly the contributors of Icelandic folk - and fairy tales had been. In general that could mean that in future research we might have to reevaluate our scholarly tales on fairy tale contributors as old and illiterate tradition carriers.
Valdimar Tr. Hafstein (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
Telling a tale of a couple of tales published by the Grimms and Andersen, I make a case for exploring an alternative figure for creative agency, besides the author and the folk, one that stands between the two opposite ends of the spectrum that these two occupy: the collector-editor.
Paper long abstract:
On 29 May 1873, H.C. Andersen noted in his diary a visit from he received from his upstairs neighbor in a Swiss spa: "A visit from Mr. Mai, who maintained that the story about "What the Old Man Does" was taken from Grimm. I told him it was a Danish folktale and that Grimm had never composed a fairy tale, he was only a collector. . . . I am not in a good mood." Three decades earlier, Andersen had accused the Grimms of publishing "one of my originals", namely the Princess on the Pea, from which he seems to have believed the Grimms knocked off The Pea Test in the fifth edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen. That Andersen elsewhere attributes both tales to oral tradition ("I heard [these tales] during childhood, in the spinning room...") seems to trouble him not one bit in this context.
In this paper I try to make sense of the dichotomous relation between the figure of the author and the figure of the folk -- two contrasting models for understanding creative agency in the 19th century. Taking as a point of departure the claims of ownership and bruised egos surrounding the publication of the tales referred to above and the encounter between Andersen and the Grimm Brothers, I make a case for exploring a third figure for creative agency, one that stands between the two opposite ends of the spectrum occupied by the author and the folk: the collector-editor, i.e. the folklorist.