I wanted to look at a source that was more contemporary and talked more about fairy tales and society in recent years so I found this book written by Jack Zipes about the reasons fairy tales are still popular today.
Annotations
Key Notes & Quotes
- Many of us “try to make a fairy tale out of our lives” even without knowing it
- Initial purpose- “communicate ideas about natural instincts, social relations, normative behaviour, character types, sexual roles, and power politics.”
- Purpose now- to entertain and instruct
- How they came about- oral storytelling
- Functions of fairy tales varied depending on sociocultural context
- Have been condensed and refined
- Friedmar Apel- Lost deeper significance due to torn relationship between imagination and reality
- Jack Zipes (counter-argument)- Apel failed to take into account adaptability and evolvability
- Fairy tales made or reiterated in the 20th/21st century- for entertainment
- More relevant today due to increase in literacy & technology
- Sperber- Due to mental representation & public representation- “Only those representations which are repeatedly communicated and minimally transformed in the process will end up belonging to the culture.”
- Contagious/ “they are injected in our systems almost as a cure for dreaded social diseases.”
- Appeal- utopian transformation- feeds desire for a better life
- Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza- “an idea is like a circuit of neurons, once an idea has been formed in our brains, it has the capacity to live for a long time, even for an entire lifetime”
- Live at a time where divorce, families of stepchildren and stepparents, dysfunctional families, child abuse is high- gives children hope- overcome abuse i.e. Cinderella
- Stories should not be explained- independent process of learning
- Tackles fears of Abandonment
- Tackled issues that haven’t been resolves over time- family legacy, sibling rivalry, parental love
- Social Darwinism?
- Norbert Elias & Pierre Bourdieu- western civilising process?
- Problems – solutions- “communicate feeling in efficient metaphorical terms”
- “use classical fairy tales in mutated forms trough new technologies to discuss and debate urgent issues that concern our social lives and the very survival of human species”
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