Any student may (and English majors must) choose to write a paper instead of taking the second or third midterm exam (or write two papers and skip both exams).  Paper topics may be chosen from the following options; in all cases, papers should be 3-5 pages in length, using standard (1") margins, line spacing, and font size.  Papers should have a descriptive title – NOT “Fairy Tale Paper” but something like “The Role of the Slipper in ‘Cinderella’.”

Whatever option you choose, be sure that you argue a specific thesis.  That is, there should be a point to the paper beyond the simple fact of analysis - it should not be “I am going to analyze ‘The Three Little Pigs’ from an anthropological approach” but rather something along the lines of “‘The Three Little Pigs’ symbolically re-enacts the fears of subsistence-level farmers faced with a hostile world.”  In this hypothetical analysis, the wolf would be interpreted as all of the hostile forces in the world (and why should these forces be embodied in a wolf?)  and the pigs as the vulnerable country folk.“

Option 1 Select a story from your course text that we have not read or scheduled to read later in the term.  Analyze the story by first identifying prominent motifs and then discussing their significance in terms of

1. The appearance of similar motifs in other fairy tales (i.e., a formalist approach, like those of Propp/Vehvilainen of Tollkien.  Specifically identify which characters or events in the folktale correspond to which formalist functions; or
2. Possible psychological significance of the tale (i.e.,  a psychoanalytic approach, relating events and characters to psychological needs.  This need not be a formal Freudian approach - i.e., you don’t need to relate everything back to childhood sexual development - but it should emphasize what the tale tells us about individual human psychology; or
3. The way in which the tale reflects the particular culture (country and, to the extent possible, time) from which it is taken (i.e.,  a sociological or anthropological approach, interpreting it in terms of what it tells us about class or gender relations in that culture).

Option 3 The Walt Disney Company has hired you to help decide what fairy tale to use for their next animated feature film.  From the tales in our course texts, choose one to recommend to Disney.  Give your recommendation in the form of a memo that explains why the story is typical of the (Disney) fairy tale tradition and why you think it would make a good animated feature.  Note that this means you should address specific issues of adaptation to film, not simply argue that it fulfills formal requirements of fairy tales and/or teaches good lessons.

Option 4 As we have read variants of a particular tale type (“Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” etc.), we have sometimes noted how changes from one tale to another reflect the author/collector’s purpose or the particular culture from which each variant arose.  Compare one of the tales in our course texts to a modern film version (animated or live-action), explaining what the changes made in the film tell us about our society and/or the director’s purpose in making the film.

Option 5 Stories like Tanith Lee's "When the Clock Strikes" or Donna Jo Napoli’s The Magic Circle (other examples include Robin McKinley’s Beauty and Gail Levine's Ella Enchanted) are literary retellings of traditional fairy tales, introducing naturalistic motivations for the characters and expanding in detail on the bare bones of the fairy tale plot.  Their approaches to the stories may allow them to use fairy tales to explore various issues of importance to the modern world.  Following the model of these writers, take one of the fairy tales from your course text (this may be one that we have read or one that we have not) and rewrite it as a short story that similarly explores modern concerns while retaining the basic plot elements of the original tale.

Option 6 Where do our best-known fairy tales come from?  A noted scholar of children’s literature polled his students to see which fairy tales they already know so well that they could tell them by memory, and consistently found the same eight tales were almost universally known.   Make a list of those fairy tales you know so well you can tell them without looking at a book, and identify their sources using some of the fairy-tale collections listed in the course bibliography.   Write an account of their origins in which you discuss why you find them memorable and relate their origins to your personal history.

Option 7 The theory of generic sedimentation, as developed by Jameson and extended by your instructor, holds that fairy-tale structures embedded within novels and stories carry with them some of the original functions of the fairy tales.  Thus, the fairy tale may help us to understand the meaning of such works.  Consider any piece of fiction that you may have read which seems to you to include fairy-tale motifs, etc., and explain how recognition of the fairy tales within the stories contribute to understanding the fiction.
 

Return to Fairy Tale Page