Fairy Tales

Fairy tales loom largely in our lives. They are 'weird,' but not shallow or irrelevant: they tell the 'extraordinary' in different traditions and facilitate cross-and transcultural dialogues between them. In this course, we will read German fairy tales from the Grimm Brothers, Novalis, Tieck, Bettina von Arnim, E.T.A. Hoffmann, etc., focus on their connections to the stories in other traditions, and explore their transformations in various media from oral storytelling to films, comic books, and music videos. We will reinterpret these fairy tales by using methodologies derived from psychoanalysis, folklore, gender, and race studies and open a creative environment for your own tales. Taught in German. Prerequisite: GERLANG 3 or permission of instructor.