Roundtable Discussion: How Fairy Tales Cast Their Spell

It's a few years old but very much a topic of the moment so even if you saw it back in '07 it's worth a revisit. Besides, a roundtable discussion with Anne Cattaneo, Mark Lamos, Donna Jo Napoli, Roger Rahtz, Maria Tatar, and Jack Zipes? What's not to love more than once about that? ;)


Here's the program blurb (with more information about the presenters from HERE):

In a recent article in Time, entitled "The End of Fairy Tales?" James Poniewozik refers to Shrek and other recent fairy-tale films and writes, "This is a new world of fairy tales: parodied, ironized, meta-fictionalized, politically adjusted and pop-culture saturated. . . . What these stories are reacting against is not so much fairy tales in general as the specific, saccharine Disney kind, which sanitized the far darker originals." This may, indeed, be true, as a reaction to Disney, but the new forms are really not new. Fairy tales have been transformed in diverse ways and have been transforming themselves ever since they originated in an oral tradition. What is fascinating about the fairy tale genre is precisely its transformative quality and capacity to capture our imaginations. However, it is not clear why we are so addicted to fairy tales and why we continually return to them, change them, and use them in such innovative ways in the theater, opera, cinema, school, at home and, of course, on the Internet. Fairy tales touch our lives from birth to death. As a genre they were never developed or cultivated for children until late in their development, and adults are largely the writers and creators of fairy tales in practically every country in the world. The tales continue to speak to us and call out, it seems, for transformation. This panel will set out to discover the sources of this tradition and how it infuses and is infused by imaginative processes, including indigenous myth, religion, art, dream-life and morality.

Note: There's a little part at the beginning with announcements and an intro as is standard for any conference-type presentation so give it a few minutes to get going and be warned: it is LONG! (But so worth it.) Without further ado here is:

Transformations: How Fairy Tales Cast Their Spell

A roundtable discussion from Philoctetes.org

(The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination)

For those who don't have time to sit here right now and watch it all and would like some notes to supplement, you're in luck! Philoctetes have also provided edited transcripts in the form of a (23 page!) Word Doc or PDF HERE (you'll need to scroll down for the link). How awesome is that?!