Housing
Seminar Schedule
Day-by-day overview
Monday, June 25
Arrival. An evening reception for NEH Summer Scholars will be hosted by Professor Tatar and the project staff.
Tuesday, June 26
Fairy Tales and their Origins
Orientation activities in the morning will include a presentation by Harvard Summer School and seminar staff, a visit to university computer facilities, and a warm welcome in the offices of the University Marshal. Luncheon in Annenberg Hall will be followed at 2:00 by the first seminar meeting.
The seminar will begin with stories told at the fireside by adults to multi-generational audiences. By the middle of the nineteenth century, fairy tales were firmly grounded in literary culture, and parents could read to their children Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” the Grimms’ “Rapunzel,” or Afanasev’s “The Firebird.” The Norton Critical Edition of Classic Fairy Tales will introduce us to multiple versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Bluebeard,” and “Hansel and Gretel.” We will begin by studying the stories qua stories in their cultural variation, focusing on the manifest content rather than latent meaning of tales that have attained canonical status in many cultures.
Thursday, June 28
“Little Red Riding Hood”
A girl, a wolf, an encounter in the woods: add them up and you have the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which first appeared in print form in Charles Perrault’s Tales from Times Past. We think of the story as archaic and primitive, but in fact it is present and alive in our own culture today. We discover its expressive intensity in works ranging from Tex Avery’s cartoon “Red Hot Riding Hood” to James Thurber’s “A Girl and a Wolf.” “Little Red Riding Hood” is our cultural story about innocence and seduction, and we recycle it almost ritualistically in order to manage cultural anxieties about the weak and the powerful. Seminar participants will meet with the instructor and identify one cultural variant of the story to bring to class for discussion. Each participant will become an expert on one version, which will be compared to the stories in Classic Fairy Tales that come from other times and places. The readings this week will offer an opportunity to begin reflecting on gender and genre in the broader context of fairy tales and fantasy literature.
Friday, June 29
Fairy Tales: The Uses of Storytelling
We will focus this week on tales for younger readers that feature boys as protagonists (e.g., “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Tom Thumb”) and compare them to tales from other cultures (e.g., “Aladdin” and “Momotaro, the Peach Boy”). Participants will examine these stories from a variety of perspectives, seeking to understand their origins, their dissemination, their structures, their archetypal elements, and their effects on listeners and readers. Why do these stories stick, as Jack Zipes has put it? How do we account for the fact that they have endured over the centuries? What do we make of their metamorphic magic—their capacity to adapt to different cultures, migrate into new media, and appeal to different generations? Are they the equivalent of what Richard Dawkins calls memes, catchy phrases, tunes, and stories that display the mutability of genes? Why have these stories survived and why do we fiercely repeat them, even in cultural productions for adults? Our guide to understanding the fairy tale will include Bruno Bettelheim, whose Uses of Enchantment drew attention to the moral and therapeutic value of fairy tales.
Monday, July 2:
Fairy Tales: Rites of Passage and Courtship Rituals
“Cinderella,” “Beauty, and the Beast,” and “Sleeping Beauty”—in their European canonical forms and in multicultural variants—will guide us as we seek to understand courtship rituals in fairy tales. We will read the work of Robert Darnton, whose essay “Peasants Tell Tales” takes us from the familiar “timeless and universal” elements in fairy tales to the challenges of identifying the importance of cultural variation and regional specificity. We will read essays by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, as well as by Jack Zipes, on competing social and ethical discourses in the tales. Have we moved beyond “Some day my prince will come” and how have fairy tales transformed themselves through what is claimed to be the “magic” and “enchantment” of the Disney film?
Tuesday, July 3:
Case Study of The Thousand and One Nights
We will begin by studying the complex and contested history of a collection that exists only in versions of itself. What is referred to collectively as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments has at its core a lost Persian storybook called Hazar Afsanah, which consisted mainly of tales imported from India. Once translated into Arabic in the eighth or ninth centuries, new stories were added and the collection became A Thousand and One Nights. Paul Nurse’s Eastern Dreams will guide us through the complex history of the Arabian Nights, and will serve as the point of departure for questions concerning translation and transculturation. We will track the migration of the stories into the literary culture of childhood and examine the morals and lesson encoded in three of the tales in the collection.
Seminar participants will together read the frame narrative of the collection and individually become experts on one tale of their own choice from The Thousand and One Nights. How useful are the tools of Anglo-American and European folklorists for understanding the tales in the collection? Are we entitled to study these tales without knowledge of the original languages in which the tales were told and with a scant understanding of cultural context? Participants will have the chance to work in groups as they compare the cultural heroes and heroines of this collection with their counterparts in European fairy tales. How are ethical codes configured, and what values are encapsulated in the narratives?
Thursday, July 5
Professor Jerry Griswold on “Home in Fairy Tales and Fantasy.”
Friday, July 6
Field Trip to the Eric Carle Museum.
Monday, July 9, and Tuesday, July 10
Fantasy: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: The Pleasures of Nonsense
With Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the world of children’s literature underwent a seismic shift, and there was a distinct turn from ethical to aesthetic investments. Spiritual uplift, moral edification, and lessons in good behavior gave way to the impulses found in fairy tales, with an emphasis on wit, imagination, and pleasure. What had once been condemned and marginalized moved to the center of literary production for children. How do we make sense of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a text that enacts resistance to interpretation and lampoons the notion of finding morals and messages? Spatial relations are overturned, the meanings of words collapse into their opposites, and beauty trumps meaning when it comes to communication—the White King tries out the terms “important” and “unimportant” and decides to use the one that “sounds best.” In a world where the use of words has become arbitrary and where everything has become indeterminate, Alice still manages to find a way to cope and to return home. We will take up the question of Alice’s journey into the story world known as Wonderland and the realm that appears when she travels through the Looking-Glass. How are those worlds structured, and how do they compare to other story worlds in children’s fiction? How do children respond to the “nonsense” in the book, and is there any kind of ethical takeaway from a book that lampoons the notion of morals and lessons?
Thursday, July 12, and Friday, July 13
Visiting scholar Donald Haase will join the seminar on these two days.
Peter and Wendy: Mapping the Child’s MindIn his novelization of the play Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie constructs a fantasy about eternal youth. Yet the work draws much of its wistful power from an engagement with mortality, from the recognition that all children, but one, will die. In this unit, we will consider how books work through children’s fears about death and how play is elevated to an impulse that creates culture. Barrie understood that flying (with its attendant lack of gravity) captured one of the supreme fantasies of childhood, and he used it to transport the Darling children to a place that offers adventure and play far removed from the workaday world. Are there any moral hazards to Barrie’s vision of childhood? And why does fantasy stand so often in the shadow of anxieties about mortality? How does Peter Pan’s narcissism function in the text and get at the question of commitment and social responsibilities?
Monday, July 16, and Tuesday, July 17
Harry Potter
NEH Summer Scholars will have the opportunity to study J.K. Rowling’s novels qua novels and as literary phenomenon. Has Rowling created a global cultural story, a new folklore that gives children across social classes and national cultures something to talk about? How do the Harry Potter books draw on mythology for their power? To what degree is Harry Potter “everygirl” or “everyboy,” a character with whom children can easily identify? What does it mean to “identify with” a character? Seminar participants will have the chance to report on the experience of the students they teach with these books. We will focus our discussions on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series.
Thursday, July 19
Grand Finale
This last official meeting of the Seminar will be reserved for reviewing our readings and identifying the grand unifying themes that emerged in our discussions.
Friday, July 20
Travel home should be arranged for this date. Campus residency ends at noon.
