(Frozen Text)

“He threw whole handfuls of frozen words on deck, and they looked like striped pills of different colors. We saw words of mouth, green words, blue words, black words, golden words.  When we warmed them a bit in our hands, they melted like snow. Then we really heard them!”

— Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

From the University of Guelph’s collection

I always enjoy having disparate paths of inquiry come together.  Or maybe it just seems like everything is coming together and making sense, and I really just need to lay off the DayQuil. Anyway, I read fairy tales.  I study them, I read about them, I write about them.  And, as I mentioned in a previous post, I have a speecher working on a speech about fanfiction.  And then this week I started reading about changing media and the Gutenberg Parenthesis.  How did these come together you ask? Well, it might just be the DayQuil, but it seemed like they did.

The same week I was reading about the advent of chapbooks causing a huge shift in oral fairy tale tradition to a literary one, my student was telling me that fanfiction didn’t come into existence until print and the copyright (in other words, before there was a fixed version and owner of a story, it wasn’t fanfiction, it was just fiction,  See Shakespeare). And then I started reading Jill Walker Rettberg’s Blogging.

In chapter two she writes:

With every media shift there have been skeptical voices lamenting the loss of whatever characteristics the previously dominant medium was perceived as promoting . . . Plato famously argued that writing had great disadvantages in comparison to oral dialogue. (49)

From Caroline Sumpter’s “Book Culture From Below”

In fact, the notion that print — and the newspaper in particular — was a killer of the oral fairy tale was a claim frequently made by Yeats himself, and one which resurfaces (from a Marxist rather than a nationaliast angle) in Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller.”

Oh, the horrors! However, If Thomas Pettit’s is right, then we are returning to a pre-print mentality and understanding of communication.  Rettberg introduces Pettit on page 47:

Before the introduction of print, Pettit argues, literature and art were seen as malleable, flexible, and changing.  A story would be performed again and again, told by a storyteller or enacted in a theatre. A song or tune would have no owner, but be played in different ways by different people. With the introduction of print, we began to think of literature as something that could be fixed in time and space. (48)

According to Pettit, this is something we are returning to with the decline of importance placed on fixed print in the digital age.  Bring it on, I say. This is an intriguing idea, and one I was unfamiliar with.  Cue the research.

What I found:

• A rather lengthy lecture by Thomas Pettit at MIT on the Guttenberg Parenthesis.  Feel free to skip the first 2 and a half minutes of intro, and then the important part is really the half hour after that (yes, it’s long, but worth the time. Seriously). If you are really pressed for time, the really interesting bit is from minutes 23 to 37. He talks about the parenthesis regimenting words so that they are contained — to stop them from “getting out,” and the effect on cognition.

• This lecture is summarized in writing here.

• A prezi on the Guttenberg Parenthesis by Amy Burvall

If you don’t feel like looking through all 191 slides, 8 and 9 are the most relevant to understanding Pettit’s perspective (8 is a video of Pettit), and 87 is my favorite.  Slam poetry, from television’s perspective. Slide 125 is a hoot — a professor from University of Argentina describes why they started a Facebook project there — because they were sick and tired of their students looking at them with cow faces.  Yup, I know that feeling.  Slide 142 is fantastic and presents guidelines from the Steal Like an Artist site.

In fact, that is so fabulous, it warrants its own image.

And the author, Austin Kleon, has a TED talk.. Yay!

I may be developing a little intellectual crush on this guy. It happens. Don’t judge.

But, I digress, back to Burvall’s Prezi. I highly encourage you to watch the whole thing and be open to it.  It is a work of art, and though I have isolated certain bits, it is understood best in its entirety.

• A paper about digital literacy and new paradigms in media and learning. The authors begin this paper with an examination of the differences in attitude toward digital media between teachers and students.  Particularly interesting to think about how beliefs about whether knowledge is owned or retrieved may be impacting classroom contexts and (mis)communication between instructor and student. Reminded me of the Argentinian professor’s cow faced students.

• A less wonky explanation of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, viewed through a journalistic lens, can be found in The Guardian.

• And a blog! Dedicated to examining the Guttenberg Parenthesis! Ok, it is pretty brief yet, she might think the Internet is a new god, and we don’t seem to have a lot in common, but it is an interesting endeavor.

For more information about fairy tales and chapbooks (because who doesn’t want to know more about that?):

• From the International Library of Children’s Literature, information about the rise and popularity of fairy tale chapbooks.

• Also, I am super excited about this project (and not-so-slightly jealous).  Students at the University of Guelph are digitizing a collection of chapbooks, archiving and curating them for a digital collection.  These are all Scottish chapbooks from the 17th and 18th centuries and contain romances, comedies, political essays, information about social customs, and yes, fairy tales. I can’t wait to see what they the end result of this project is.

 

Disney, Fairy Tales, and Nazis

So, I always thought Disney was the worst thing to happen to fairy tales (Sorry, Jen’s Quill Pen!).  Then I read this book:

image from Google Books

As it turns out, the Nazis may have been worse when it comes to nefarious use of fairy and folk tales.  According to Zipes, in the Nazi era “folktales were considered to be holy or sacred Aryan relics.  Therefore, the classical fairy tales of the Grimms, Anderson, and Bechstein were promoted as ideal on recommended reading lists for children.” Yikes. He goes on to quote Christa Kamenetsky, author of Children’s Literature in Hitler’s Germany,  “The innocent folktale was transformed into an ideological weapon meant to serve the building of the Thousand Year Reich. Thus party official Alfred Eyd announced in 1935, “the German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young.”” Those bastards.  

Now we are getting to the part that makes me a little uncomfortable (instead of righteously indignant, which is a pretty  comfortable feeling for me):

If I understand Zipes correctly, to accomplish this they did not rewrite the tales stressing Aryan features and so forth, rather there was “an enormous effort made by educators, party functionaries, and literary critics to revamp the interpretation of the tales in accordance with Nazi ideology and to use those interpretations in socializing children.” The most popular tales of the time were used to stress the importance of large families and fertility, purity, an authoritarian male at the head of each family, and a young woman seeking salvation through her modesty, industriousness, and virginity.  Likewise, for the male protagonist to achieve his goal he must demonstrate strength, loyalty, and at times the ability to kill that which threatens the stability of the “rightful” order. There was absolute loyalty to the state, at the expense of even the family unit if need be. This socialization through interpretation was an explicit policy of the Third Reich.

Here’s the problem. This mutable ability of the tales, this capacity to be analyzed, interpreted, reinterpreted, to mean different things to different people at different times in their lives is one of the things I love about fairy tales.  It is a question of what the tale is essentially about.  Is Red Riding Hood about not talking to strangers, not straying from the path, staying true to yourself, the danger of being consumed by some elemental force in the woods, be afraid of the wolf, or sexual maturity, or something else all together?  The discussion is endless and fascinating. Who decides?

The fact is it’s the storyteller.  Every storyteller takes the tale, combines it with some social aspect of self and audience and produces something new.  Even the Grimms did this.  When you look for it you can see evidence of their desire for German unification and self-determination all over the place.  Frankly, this is the fun of telling stories.  When the storyteller is controlled by the state, or by the market, we have a problem. Because every storyteller has an agenda.

I guess I would rather the agenda be an individual one, rather than an institutionalized one.

I think what makes me uncomfortable about the Nazi agenda is that their interpretation of the tales that I love was based on the text, which has always been my defense as well — and ultimate question: Can it be supported with evidence from the text? It bothers me that their answer to that was “yes.”  They didn’t rewrite anything, just looked at them through a different lens.  The Nazis put themselves into the history of the discourse surrounding these tales, and the stories feel all tainted now.  Yuck.

Anyway, I guess the Nazis were worse than Disney.  But that doesn’t let Disney off the hook, especially when they do things like this.