#zipes

[bigbluebennu]

A couple of Art Fight revenge pieces :]

[arco-rc]

ZIPES, Jack. Romper el hechizo. Una visión política de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos. Lumen, Buenos Aires, 2001.

Romper el hechizo analiza histórica y críticamente la evolución de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, su influencia sobre las creencias populares, la ideología que hay detrás de ellos, y el modo en que son incorporados a la cultura mediática de hoy. Jack Zipes hace hincapié en las fuerzas socio-históricas que han modificado la función de los cuentos maravillosos en los últimos tres siglos. Además, analiza el uso de los mismos por parte de una amplia gama de autores (incluyendo a los hermanos Grimm, Charles Perrault, los románticos alemanes, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde, y J. R. R. Tolkien), y aporta una evaluación de su perdurable importancia. Nuestras vidas están moldeadas por cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, pero en ese molde nunca completamos el sentido de los cuentos por nosotros mismos. Sigue siendo ilusorio, al igual que nuestra propia historia. Desde que nacemos hasta que morimos, escuchamos y nos embebemos del saber de los cuentos folclóricos y maravillosos, y sentimos que nos pueden ayudar a alcanzar nuestro destino. Saben y nos dicen que, queremos transformarnos en reyes y reinas, ontológicamente hablando, que queremos ser amos de nuestros propios reinos, en contacto con los proyectos de nuestras vidas y nuestras autoproyecciones para destacarnos como hacedores de historia.

[arco-rc]

[adaptingclassics-blog]

On page eight of Jack Zipes’ text, “Filmic Adaptation and Appropriation of the Fairy Tale,” he mentioned a point that I found to be very interesting. He stated that “Many literary fairy tales are already adaptations.” At first this was a little bit surprising to me, but then he mentioned how back then, these fairy tales were mostly shared through word of mouth and oral traditions. So when these stories were being told, not every detail is remembered and some details are added, just like the game of telephone. Not only were these stories being passed on by people just talking about them, sometimes they would be translated from other languages as well. With this, details can get confused and thrown around in the translation. So from the translations and people speaking the tales more than writing them, the tales became more illustrated and spread in many different ways. A second concept that he talked about was also on page eight in the first new paragraph. In this paragraph, Jack Zipes talked about how many fairytale films are rarely drawn off of a single fairytale. “The majority of filmmakers have not relied upon a single text as hypotext to adapt a fairytale.” I found this very interesting because normally you would think that a movie about a fairytale would come from that fairy and that fairytale only, but instead it involves a combination of many different  texts, that the people that are helping make the film, incorporate. 

NP

[carmennave]

Wish List

Here's my Christmas list for the year. I cannot wait to reread these Grimm tales in their gory originalish* details. I must have had one of the middle versions growing up, because I do remember Cinderella's step sisters cutting off parts of their feet, but lots more seems totally new.

*After all, they still went through at least one filter, by the brothers collecting them and writing them down.

[beautysthesis-blog]

The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale

Zipes, Jack. "The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale." The Lion Adn the Unicorn 12.2 (1988): 7-29. Project Muse. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.emerson.edu/journals/lion_and_the_unicorn/v012/12.2.zipes.html>

"Tales are marks that leave traces of the human struggle for immortality. Tales are human marks invested with desire." 7

"During its inception, the fairy tale distinguished itself as genre both by appropriating the oral folk tale and expanding it, for it became gradually necessary in the modern world to adapt the oral tale to standards of literacy and make it acceptable for diffusion in the public sphere. The fairy tale is only one type of appropriation of a particular oral storytelling tradition: the wonder folk tale, often called the Zaubermärchen or the magic tale. As more and more wonder tales were written down in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, they constituted the genre of the literary fairy tale that began establishing its own conventions, motifs, topoi, characters, [End Page 7] and plots, based to a large extent on those developed in the oral tradition but altered to address a reading public formed by the aristocracy and the middle classes. Though the peasants were excluded in the formation of this literary tradition, it was their material, tone, style, and beliefs that were incorporated into the new genre in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries." <--Answers What Are Fairy Tales

symbols that are easily identifiable, so we can reproduce the spirit of the tale and have the same associations each time. 9-10

"depends on the manner in which a narrator/author arranges known functions of a tale aesthetically and ideologically to induce wonder and then transmits the tale as a whole according to customary usage of a society in a given historical period." 13

Producer - Audience - Function

19th century

individual

bourgeois

socialization

writer

lower middle

social critique

bourgeois

classes

amusement

individual

reception

23

"We initiate children and expect them to learn the fairy-tale code as part of our responsibility in the civilizing process. This code has its keywords and keymarks, but it is not a static code." 29.

1. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale.

2. The number of functions known to the tale is limited. - Vladimir Propp. 8

"The utopian "project" of the early French [End Page 15] fairy tales endows wonder with a certain nationalist component. It is well known that Louis XIV, the Sun King, sought to have the world admire his court and France, and that the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie desired, more or less, to make French culture the standard for all cultures. Therefore, the creation of fairy-tale realms represented a general French tendency to elevate language and folk material as exemplary, and the functions within the tales are meant to induce wonder in the readers so that they will strive to admire and imitate the protagonists or learn from their mistakes. Those fairy-tale realms become magnificent in the tales, and those fortunate destinies that are depicted celebrate the wonders of the French or the possibilities that the French have to become wondrous." 16

[beautysthesis-blog]

Day 1: Propp, Zipes, and the beginnings of a formula

Vladimir Propp formulated a theory that every Russian folk tale followed a predictable, simplified pattern. It included characters, the dilemmas and obstacles they would face, the outcome and the sequence of the story.  The formula, while simple and unswerving, could still describe a myriad of diverse folktales. According to Jack Zipes, this was because Propp’s rules held that:

1. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale.

2. The number of functions known to the tale is limited. [i]

The first rule allows for fluidity and interpretation among characters and functions in stories. For example, the function of the “Beast” character is always the same – loving “Beauty” – no matter if he is the protagonist as in Cyrano de Bergerac, or is split into two different characters as in Notre-Dame de Paris. And while none of the novels have the fairy-tale ending of marriage in the traditional sense, the first rule allows the function to happen “independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled”. Quasimodo never takes vows with Esmeralda, yet he ends his days with her, and if marriage is a kind of death in the sense that it is a rite of passage, the death of one way of life and the birth of another – well, Hugo must have had some concept of this, to title the chapter in which we discover the Hunchback’s fate as “The Marriage of Quasimodo.”

The second rule balances the first – while these functions may be in flux and interpretive, there is still a limit. The number of functions known to the tale – the characters, the obstacles and actions – are solid and finite in their most simplified form.

The second rule is illustrated by the Aarne-Thompson Classification system, which is used to categorize fairy-tales. The “Beauty and the Beast” fable is categorized as 425C. It is a sub-category of type 425, “The Search for a Lost Husband”, described as:

The Monster as Husband. (a) A monster is born because of a hasty wish of the parents. (b) He is a man at night. (c) A girl promises herself as bride to the monster, (c1) to recover stolen clothes or jewels, (c2) to escape from captivity in spring or well, (c3) or a girl seeks out or accidentally discovers a supernatural husband, (d) or her father promises her (d1) in order to secure a flower his daughter has asked him to bring from journey (d2) to pay a gambling debt, or (d3) to escape form danger. (e) The father and daughter try in vain to send another girl as the monster's bride.

Disenchantment of the Monster. (a) The girl disenchants the monster (dwarf, bear, wolf, ass, snake, hog, hedgehog, frog, bird, or tree) by means of a kiss and tears, or (b) by burning the animal skin or (c) by decapitation, or (d) by other means.

Loss of the Husband. (a) But she loses him because she has the burned the animal's skin too soon, or (b) has revealed his secret to his sisters, or (c) has broken other prohibitions, (c1) looking at him, (c2) kissing him, or (c3) staying too long at home.

Search for Husband. (a) She undergoes a sorrowful wandering in iron shoes, (b) gets magic objects from an old woman or from her own child, (c) asks her direction from the wind and stars, (d) climbs a steep glass mountain, (e) takes service as maid with witch who gives her impossible or dangerous tasks to perform, or (f) deceives importunate suitors.

Recovery of Husband. (a) She buys with three jewels three nights by the side of her lost husband, and wins him back, or (b) disenchants him by affectionate treatment. (c) Sometimes she must go on a journey and be compassionate to people and objects.

The sub-category includes a few more important details particular to the “Beauty and the Beast” version of the “Search for the Lost Husband”:

425C - Beauty and the Beast. Father stays overnight in mysterious palace and takes a rose. Must promise daughter to animal (or she goes voluntarily). Tabu: overstaying at home. She finds the husband almost dead. Disenchants him by embrace. (No search, no tasks.)[ii]

  [i]  The changing function of the fairy tale :: Jack Zipes :: in the Lion and the Unicorn :: Through Project MUSE

[ii] http://www.brown.edu/Courses/FR0133/Michele_Wan/taletype.html

[beautysthesis-blog]

Das Books

Griswold, Jerome. Meanings of "Beauty and the Beast": a handbook.

Zipes, Jack David. Beauties, beasts, and encantment: classic French fairy tales.

Tatar, Maria. Off with Their heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood.

Propp, Vladimir. The Morphology of the Folktale