LIT 327 The Fairy Tale

General

• Students can describe and recognize common tropes, characters, dilemmas, and resolutions in the fairy tale (as well as familiar combinations of these elements).
• Students understand theories of narrative, characterization, and rhetorical style in fairy tales, and can explain how they function together to create a complete story.
• Students can distinguish the differences between folklore and fairy tales, and articulate their cultural implications.
• Students can explain how writing down a fairy tale changes it from a previous existence as an oral tale (folklore), and what significant impacts that has on the story.
• Students can construct how fairy tale conventions employ tensions between self and Other, and explain how this informs the concept of the Monster/Monstrous. Students can relate these conventions to historic and contemporary conventions of behavior and misbehavior, especially in terms of gender and class.
• Students can correlate how fairy tales are used to teach children about others (in both positive and negative ways) with how the symbolic imagination is used as a scaffold for cultural institutions such as government, religion, education, and family structure.
• Students can construct a thesis, use scholarly and primary sources to support the thesis, and argue analytically in grammatical, correct prose at the upper-division level.