Fairy Tales: Seduction, Subversion, and Transformation

Once upon a time, there were tales. Traveling the trade routes through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, they transformed as they went. These stories carried the seeds of everything, as tales are wont to do: humor, bawdiness, violence, morality, warnings, conservative traditionalism, alongside the possibility for subversion, magic. We encounter them now in their defanged and least interesting form: Disney-fied, with beautiful princesses and handsome, boring princes living happily ever-after.

The uncanny power of the fairy tale fascinated nearly everyone: Marxists and fascists, Freud and Jung, Italo Calvino and Richard Wagner, feminists and surrealists and libertines. What explains the allure and politics of fairy tales? Why, in particular, did so many 20th-century feminists and leftists see in fairy tales not the happy Hollywood ending or conservative moralism, but stories charged with the power for social transformation?

In this course, we will discuss such questions and more by reading canonical versions of the tales (the Grimms, Charles Perrault, The Arabian Nights) alongside retellings and revisionings by Angela Carter, AS Byatt, Philip Pullman, Clarice Lispector, and Helen Oyeyemi, and bring in theorists and scholars to guide us, including Walter Benjamin, John Berger, JRR Tolkien, Ernst Bloch, Kate Bernheimer, Jack Zipes, and Maria Tatar. What is it about fairy tales like “Bluebeard” and “Beauty and the Beast,” that prompt us to explore questions of power, sex, violence, seduction, entrapment, nature, and transformation? How can fairy tales help us tell our own tales today?

“Fairy Tales: Seduction, Subversion, and Transformation” will also run in-person at BISR Central, on Thursdays, starting April 9th. For more information and to enroll, please visit the course page.

Course Schedule

$335.00

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