The Incomprehensible Gianni Rodari

Review of La poetica di Rodari: Utopia del folklore e nonsense. By Giulia Massini. Rome: Carocci, 2011. 159 pp. L’orecchio verde di Gianni Rodari. Edited by Stefano Panzarasa. Rome: Viterbo Stampa Alernativa/Nuovi Equilibri, 2011. 226 pp. Non solo filastrocche: Rodari e la letteratura del novecentro. By Mariarosa Rossitto. Rome: Bulzoni, 2011. 280 pp. Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto. By Gianni Rodari, Trans. Antony Shugar. Illustr. Federico Maggioni. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011. 208 pp

Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales

This revised, expanded, and updated edition of the 1979 landmark Breaking the Magic Spell examines the enduring power of fairy tales and the ways they invade our subjective world. In seven provocative essays, Zipes discusses the importance of investigating oral folk tales in their socio-political context and traces their evolution into literary fairy tales, a metamorphosis that often diminished the ideology of the original narrative. Zipes also looks at how folk tales influence our popular beliefs and the ways they have been exploited by a corporate media network intent on regulating the mystical elements of the stories. He examines a range of authors, including the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Ernst Bloch, Tolkien, Bettelheim, and J.K. Rowling to demonstrate the continuing symbiotic relationship between folklore and literature. A stimulating contribution to the critical literature of folk and fairy tales. -- Children’s Literature Association Quarterly The name Jack Zipes is synonymous with highly regarded and widely read anthologies and critiques of fairy tales. -- Choice All libraries should acquire this new edition of one of the most influential texts in the field. -- Choice Fairy Tales are a highly fashionable study today for literary scholars as well as folklorists, and another new book shows what a range of interest can be evoked by them. This time in Jack Zipes’ interesting and vigorous study. -- Encounter Zipes reveals the extraordinary breadth of his acquaintance with both recent and classic literature in the field of folk and fairytale research. -- Fabula Zipes manages the impressive trick of communicating both detail and overview without simplifying either. . . the serious folklorist should should defnitely have this on his bookshelf. -- Fortean Times Zipes ably demonstrates that moral, political, religious, and other ideologies have shaped these apparently innocent narratives. -- Lore and Language This problematic, provocative study will undoubtedly provide stimulating reading for many audiences. -- Romantic Movement Zipes has written a stimulating and important contribution to the sociology of popular literature. -- Sociological Review Places traditional tales in their socio-political, economic and cultural contexts. -- Teacher Librarian Folklorists, educators and historians will particularly find this resource to be valuable. But educators and parents will also find Zipes’s ideas intriguing. -- Elizabeth Herron -- Folks and Fairies in Action (resourcecenterblog.wordpress.com)https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_folklore/1014/thumbnail.jp

Un remake de La Barbe bleue, ou l’au-revoir à Perrault

L’éclipse, la transformation et la ré-interprétation sont des composantes fonctionnelles majeures dans un processus de mémétique. Elles permettent à un conte donné de devenir populaire et classique dans la civilisation occidentale — et dans le cas de La Barbe bleue, particulièrement dans la culture française. Par exemple, dans La Barbe-bleue ou la Tentation rituelle, Pierre Saintyves analyse le conte comme partie du processus de rituels initiatiques et examine ses transformations à travers les siècles. À cet égard, la réappropriation filmique par Catherine Breillat de « Barbe bleue » en 2009 est très significative de l’évolution du conte de fées, d’une tradition orale au cinéma et nouveaux media, en passant par les versions écrites. L’effacement de Perrault (celui de Breillat viendra également) indique combien les contes dépendent intimement de la résonnance qu’ils trouvent parmi leur audience et leurs pratiques culturelles. Les contes de Barbe bleue et leurs variantes dans d’autres champs de production culturelle, tels que les films, agissent comme des mèmes et font partie d’un processus singulier de « remakes » à l’intérieur du genre plus large du conte de fées. Cet essai analyse la Barbe bleue de Catherine Breillat en tant que « remake » filmique dans le but de mieux comprendre comment les contes de fées oraux et littéraires interagissent avec les nouveaux media dans le cadre d’une longue tradition pour constituer un discours féerique qui traite des changements dans les mœurs, les attitudes ainsi que les valeurs.Overshadowing, transformation, and remaking are key functional components in a memetic process that enables a particular fairy tale to become popular and classical in western culture —and in the case of Bluebeard, especially in French culture. For instance, in La Barbe-bleue ou la Tentation rituelle, Pierre Saintyves traces the origins of the tale as part of an initiation ritual and examines how it was transformed over centuries. In this regard, Catherine Breillat’s filmic appropriation of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” in 2009 is exceedingly significant for what it reveals about the historical evolution of the fairy tale from the oral tradition through print to our present-day of cinematic-digital representation. The effacement of Perrault —and eventually Breillat’s name will be effaced— indicates how the tales themselves and storytelling depend greatly on the resonance that they find in large groups of people and their cultural processes. Bluebeard tales and their variants in other fields of cultural production such as film act as memes with supernormal stimuli and are part of a singular discursive process of remakings within the larger genre of the fairy tale, and this essay analyzes Breillat’s Bluebeard as a filmic remake with an eye toward understanding how oral and literary tales have interacted with new media in a long historical tradition to form a fairy-tale discourse that addresses changes in manners, attitudes, and values

Excavating Childhood: Fairytales, Monsters and Abuse Survival in Lynda Barry’s What It Is

This article investigates the excavation of abused childhood in Lynda Barry’s What It Is. Looking at the centrality of childish play, fairy tales and the Gorgon in the protagonist’s effort to cope with maternal abuse, it argues that comics complicate the life narrative and allow the feminist reconfiguration of the monstrous mother of Western psychoanalysis and art

Why Fantasy Matters Too Much

In his article Why Fantasy Matters Too Much Jack Zipes proposes that fantasy in contemporary culture functions as a celebrity and money-making machine. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrates spectacles as illusions of social relations based on power. Thus, spectacles violate and drain our imagination by glorifying social relations of power made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we do not know and products not of our own making we consume mentally and physically. We reproduce images consciously and unconsciously not of our own making. The media and the corporate world occupy our psyches and manipulate our fantasies even when we dream. Our relations are mediated through the spectacle of fantasy and the fantastic spectacle and through fetish abetted by the latest technology that connects us while disconnecting us from our minds and feelings. Simultaneously, we seek to project our desires in the form of fantasies onto reality and endeavor to occupy a space in which our most profound wishes and desires can be realized. We seek cognition and recognition. In each instance -- in the tension between corporate determination of the fantastic and individual projection of desire -- we seem to anchor our understanding of reality in artworks dependent on the fantastic such as the Bible and fairy tales

Hermynia zur Mühlen’s Why?

Hermynia zur Mühlen (1883–1951) was the most famous and prolific writers of fairy tales for children during the Weimar Republic (1919–33). Born into an Austrian aristocratic family, she “betrayed” her heritage to become a communist and major translator of American writers. She also published antifascist and mystery novels under a pseudonym. The story “Why?” was a direct response to the Great Depression and appeared in a collection of tales with the title Es war einmal … und es wird sein (Once upon a Time … and It Will Be, 1930)

Luigi Capuana’s Search for the New Fairy Tale

Complementing Gina M. Miele’s article on Luigi Capuana in this issue of Marvels & Tales, this contribution offers an English translation of five tales by the Italian writer, who wanted to recapture the essence of the old, authentic fairy tale and create new stories that were less didactic and less frivolous than those generally being published for children in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. Three tales focus on the figure of the storyteller, and two tales serve as interesting examples of Capuana’s great capacity to embrace traditional Sicilian folklore and to reinvigorate traditional types and motifs in his terse, succinct, and ironic style

The Meaning of Fairy Tale within the Evolution of Culture

Since the term fairy tale or conte de fées has become so troublesome for scholars and does not do justice in English to the “revolutionary” implications of its inventor, Mme d’Aulnoy, this article explores its historical significance in depth by discussing the role of the fairies in d’Aulnoy’s works, especially in “The Isle of Happiness,” “The Ram,” and “The Green Serpent.” In the process it also demonstrates how fairies were part of a long oral and literary tradition in French culture and how d’Aulnoy’s employment of fairies in her tales owes a debt to Greek and Roman myths, the opera, theatrical spectacles, debates about the role of women in French society, and French folklore. Finally, the article explores how a cultural evolutionary approach to the rise of French fairy tales may help us understand how and why the elusive term fairy tale has spread as a meme and become so whale-like