John's Fairy and Folk Tale X-perience

Recently, philosopher and activist Dr. Cornel West came to McDaniel and delivered an amazing talk which covered a variety of topics. One part of his talk that particularly touched me and, I think, a lot of other students here at McDaniel who participate in the music program, was a comparison that he made between music and acts of giving. In a good musical performance, he said, a person pours their entire self into their performance so that those listening can be filled with whatever emotion they hear in the music. Likewise, the greatest acts of charity are those that involve giving our whole selves to help others or further a cause. Oscar Wilde, I think, understood this idea quite well, as he expresses it beautifully in his story "The Nightingale and the Rose." In an especially powerful scene, the Nightingale pierces her heart on a thorn, singing all the while the most beautiful song that has ever been heard, so that a young student can have a red rose to give to the wom...

This week, we read a number of folktales from various Native American cultures. As with many of the less familiar tales that we have read in this class, I did find it interesting that many of the basic motifs of these tales were quite similar to many of the other ones that we've read. That being said, however, there were also some features of the Native America tales that made them unique when compared to, for example, some of the more familiar European ones that we've read. For one thing, Native American cultures seem to include many more examples of stories intended to explain certain natural phenomena than European ones do. Among the stories we read, for example, were the stories of how mosquitos came to be, how two particular stars were created, and how men and women first "got together." The Native Americans stories also seemed to put a much greater emphasis on the importance of community. In the story of "Deer Hunter and White Corn Maiden," for examp...

For this week's post, I read the last three entries on the blog of one of my classmates, Kendal. In her entries, Kendal had a lot of interesting stuff to say on the fairy tales we have read, including the "Cinderella" and the Trickster stories, as well the Kenyan stories told to us by Dr. K'Olewe. In her most recent entry on Trickster stories, Kendal talks about Charles Perrault's "Little Thumbling" and a story from Louisiana called "The Singing Bones." She points out that in both of these stories, the main characters are able escape from danger because of their quick wits. In "Little Thumbling" in particular, the ability of Thumbling to not talk, but listen plays an important part in helping him to eventually save the day. Far from indicating stupidity, as his family suggests, Thumbling's ability to listen seems to help to make him smarter, something which I also think is a really cool aspect of this story. In her entry on K...

In the Norton collection of fairy tales which she edits, Maria Tartar chooses to put into one chapter, a collection of tales which she calls "Trickster" tales. This sort of tale typically involves one or more children (often siblings if more than one) who are in some way forced by their parents or circumstance or a combination of the two, to leave the safety of the home and enter the outside world. In this outside world, they run into some kind danger - a witch, ogre, or other supernatural beast - which they are able to overcome, despite their diminutive size, with their wits. They then return home, often with riches, and live happily ever after. Two examples of this sort of tale would be "Hansel and Gretel" and "Jack and the Beanstalk" Freudian critic Bruno Bettelheim interprets these trickster stories as symbolizing a child's growth into a higher level of independence and away from the oral fixations of early childhood. He argues in The Uses of En...