Sussex Centr e for Folk lor e, Fairy tales a nd Fa ntasy Newsletter Jun/Jul 2012
Inside this Issue
Gramarye launch.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Folklore and Fantasy Conference Success .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 5 After Grimm: Fairy Tales and the Art of Story-Telling Conference.. . . . . . . . .6 ‘After Grimm’ Tale Writing .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 7 Sex, Lies and Videotape: The Brothers Grimm Experience.. . . . .7 Reviews for ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Have You Seen ‘Snow White’ Yet? .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 John Pazdziora reviews Grimm in Lisbon 2012 .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .12 Good News for Jane/ Tolkien Conference .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Gr amarye Launch The launch of the Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy
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n Tuesday 29 May, Gramarye was launched. Steve O’Brien enthralled the audience with exciting, suspenseful, ancient stories from Ireland and Denmark, while Bill Gray traversed the history of the word ‘gramarye’, from medieval France, via Scotland, through Sir Walter Scott and Tolkien to our present-day journal.
F O L K LO R E | FA I RY TA L E S | FA N TA S Y
The Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy
Issue 1 comprises 72 pages of full-colour illus trated articles by Jacqueline Simpson, Diane Purkiss, Maria Nikolajeva, Karl Bell, Stephen Badman and John Herbert, Robert Duggan and Karen Stevens. For more information visit our website.
Issue I Spring 2012
New work by • Jacqueline Simpson • Diane Purkiss • Maria Nikolajeva • Karl Bell • John Herbert and Stephen Badman • Robert Duggan • Karen Stevens
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Available to buy now The journal is priced at £5 plus p&p and is currently available from Chichester University’s online store. It is also available from: • Kim’s Bookshop (Chichester) • Precinct Books (Hayling Island) • Atlantis bookshop (London’s Museum Street) • Treadwells (Bloomsbury) • Dave’s Comics (Brighton); • Sunflowers of Winchester; • Small Hands for Light Work (Kent); • Way Out There And Back (Arundel); • FairyGoodies.co.uk • Gardners and Betrams • Amazon Let us know if there’s a bookshop you’d like to see selling Gramarye.
Submission Guidelines Submissions should be sent for consideration as word doc or .rtf attachment to the editor (Email: b.gray@chi.ac.uk). Submissions should be accompanied by a separate file with the title, a 100-word abstract and a brief (100 words) biographical note. Relevant colour image files, along with copyright permission, may also be supplied at this stage. Only original articles that are not simultaneously under consideration by another journal will be considered. Unrevised student essays or theses cannot be considered.
Style Submissions must include all quotations, endnotes, and the list of works cited. References should follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
Permissions for Copyrighted Materials For contributions that include any copyrighted materials, the author must secure written permission (specifying “non-exclusive world rights and electronic rights�) to reproduce them. The author must submit these written permissions with their final manuscript. Permission fees are the responsibility of the author.
Folklore and Fantasy Conference “Academically and socially a huge success”
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he Folklore Society and the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy were delighted with the success of our Folklore and Fantasy Conference, Friday 13th to Sunday 15th April 2012, and look forward to working with each other again soon.
Feedback Delegates kindly supplied feedback and among the many, varied and interesting things we learned were the facts that some speakers need microphones, some chairpersons are too kind and that questions at the end of a panel can be better than questions after each speaker. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of our favourite quotes: “I think you should do more with FLS, I certainly was so impressed by the enthusiasm and friendliness of them all.” “The conference certainly enlarged my experience and knowledge more than I had expected. Many thanks again for your brilliant work in ensuring the conference ran smoothly.” “I really liked the coming together of different people and different thoughts. Everyone had so many different things to share. Met such fantastic people. I still feel excited and inspired over all the information, thoughts etc I got from it.” “I want to thank you for an interesting conference. I myself specially want to thank the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy for
giving me the chance to discuss my ideas and my fieldwork in a English setting.” “I’d like to say a massive thank you for such a wonderful conference - I had a fantastic(!) time and look forward to attending more SCFFF events in the future.” “I found the conference well worth attending, and particularly enjoyed learning more about folklore as my main interest is in fantasy. I also felt that the combination of folklore and fantasy worked pretty well together.” “Academically and socially, this conference weekend was a huge success … It was great to be in the lovely city of Chichester, with like-minded people talking about subjects that interest me.” With all that in mind, don’t forget to book your place at...
After Grimm: Fairy Tales and the Art of StoryTelling Conference Thursday 6th – Saturday 8th September 2012
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ingston University and Chichester University present a conference to celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of the first volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor Donald Haase, Neil Philip, Professor Marina Warner and Professor Jack Zipes.
Go to our website for more information.
‘After Grimm’ Tale Writing Judged by Marina Warner and Jack Zipes
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s the groundbreaking collection of the Brothers Grimm Kinder- und Hausmärchen moves into its third century, you are invited to try your hand at writing fairytales.
Submission: (This competition is open only to Kingston, Essex and Chichester University students and alumni.) Email your submission of 500-1,000 words l.bottomley@kingston.ac.uk. Visit the website for full submission details. Deadline: Midnight, 1 August 2012. First prize £150; 2nd and 3rd prizes: £50.
Sex, Lies and Videotape: The Brothers Grimm Experience Evening Public Lecture
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anet Dowling, professional storyteller and winner of the McDowall Essay Prize for her article on the Green Man and the Seth legend, gives this public lecture and presentation at: The Cloisters, Bishop Otter Campus,
Chichester University, College Lane, Chichester, PO19 6PE
5.15 – 6.30 p.m., Wednesday 10 October. Admission £5/£3 or free to staff and students For more details or to book your ticket contact Heather Robbins at h.robbins@chi.ac.uk
Reviews for ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’
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weet, cartoony fairy tales are out – and a live-action return to the dark fairy tales of the past is back. Or so Hollywood has announced with three Snow Whites, two Sleeping Beauties, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Jack the Giant Killer, Pinocchio, a Little Mermaid and NBC’s second season of Grimm all either appearing now or in production. At the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, we are fascinated by how all of these representations compare, but this article focuses on the reactions to ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’, for which the Centre’s founder Prof. Bill Gray acted as Mythic and Folklore Consultant. Maria Tatar compared ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ with the 19th-century Grimms version ‘Little Snow White’ and Disney’s 1937 version for the New Yorker. While Grimm purists may regard Disney’s Snow White as ‘a sentimental confection’, it did preserve the childhood fears of parental persecution and abandonment as well as adult anxieties about ageing and loss. As Tatar says, ‘The horror of the queen’s transformation from a beautiful woman into an abject old hag is still potent.’ ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ plays on the Hollywood stereotypes of female ageing, as Charlize Theron’s portrayal of the evil queen (abandoned by her first husband for a younger woman) is threatened by the younger, sylph-like Kristen Stewart. The quest for everlasting youth (as much a goal today as ever) is made into something inherently evil, in a landscape where a ‘despoiled Mother Nature
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/ snow-white-and-the-huntsman-and-fairy-tales.html
mirrors and magnifies the wicked queen’s frenzied assaults on humans’. The two modern Snow White films (‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ and ‘Mirror Mirror’) released this year both attempted to ‘empower Snow White’ in a way previous versions have not, as Philip French noted in the Observer –although perhaps SWATH took its feminism too far for him, as he felt it was ‘muddy, bloody, violent and overlong’. Of the two contemporary films, SWATH was very much the darker, but Maria Cuervo was disappointed that it did not reach the darkness of the earliest written versions, with its ‘elements of murderous jealousy, ritual cannibalism, sexual temptation, necrophilia and capital punishment’. Peter Bradshaw compared the two modern Snow Whites for the Guardian. He feels that both films missed the ‘poignant clarity of Snow White being betrayed by a non-mother and then having to be a quasi-mother to seven little people’, which he suspects might be too ‘babyish’ for modern Hollywood. Nevertheless, he appreciates Theron’s queen tackling the sexual jealousy between her and her step-daughter where Julia Robert’s queen did not. Kristen Stewart, seemingly inextricable from her Twilight role, continues to excel in roles involving unresolved romantic choices between two partners – this time between her Huntsman and a prince (named William!) – which Bradshaw saw as a ‘franchise-friendly’ decision. Jonathan Kim at the Huffington Post, in his comparison of the two 2012 films, praised ‘Snow White http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/ snow-white-and-the-huntsman-and-fairy-tales.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jun/03/snow-white-andhuntsman-review Fortean Times, 290, July 2012, pp.54-5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/31/snow-whiteand-huntsman-review
and the Huntsman’’s ‘radically different and … braver approach, hearkening back to the darker, more menacing roots of traditional fairy tales, which were largely created to scare children into obeying rules, not delighting and entertaining them to play dress-up.’ The ‘cinematography is magnificent’, and ‘in terms of acting, Theron steals the show, giving us a rare glimpse into what motivates someone to become an evil sorceress, having learned at an early age that beauty and magic are the only ways to wrest power from men who would use and abuse her when her looks fade’. Also, the casting of regularsized actors, shrunk down digitally, allowed for a much higher calibre of actor. However, Kim was less impressed with Kristen Stewart, who seemed ‘amazingly well-adjusted for someone whose father was murdered by her stepmom and was locked away to spend her formative years in a squalid prison cell’. Tatar notes that for ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’, ‘the tale has been reconceived to appeal to an audience partial to high-decibel special effects, monsters and vampires, triangulated teen romance, epic battle scenes, and young warrior women.’ Although this concoction sounds ideal for a 21stcentury Hollywood take on Snow White, Jack Zipes fears that if the Brothers Grimm could see the hype surrounding their bicentenary, they ‘would surely be concerned that the tales of the folk are being turned into trivial pulp for the masses by the globalised culture industry’. He longs for representations and recreations of fairy tales full of ‘such verve and imagination that they do not depend on hype to appeal to audiences’.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kim/snow-whiteand-the-huntsman-review_b_1561735.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/ snow-white-and-the-huntsman-and-fairy-tales.html http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=4 16485&sectioncode=26
So does ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ have the verve and imagination to appeal without the hype? Jonathan Kim was concerned that it was in fact that special Hollywood hype of ‘mass appeal’ that may have let the movie down. He felt the filmmakers tried too hard to appeal to too many target groups; the Grimm fans by keeping it serious, the girl-teens with Kristen Stewart in the romantic lead, and the males with action sequences. However dark, gruesome and ‘hyped’ these new versions of Snow White are, Maria Cuervo assures us that the most horrifying aspect of Snow White which haunts us all, no matter which target group we’re in, is tempus fugit, and this universal fear will ensure that Snow White will continue to be retold again and again. – Heather Robbins Fortean Times, 290, July 2012, pp.54-5.
Snow White and the Huntsman Have you seen it yet?
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ollowing Prof. Bill Gray’s role as Mythic and Folklore Advisor, the University of Chichester is interested in finding out whether bringing academics on board seems to have improved the film (or not!) and also whether the film helps to bring people to the source material. Please note that this questionnaire was originally geared towards a non-specialist audience, so question 3 in particular would hardly apply to members of the Sussex Centre Mailing List.’ We would be very grateful if you could fill this survey out once you’ve seen the film: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SMPFQY8
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John Patrick Pazdziora reviews Grimm in Lisbon 2012
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airy tale scholars from around the world gathered in Lisbon for ‘The Grimm Brothers Today: Kinder- und Hausmärchen and its Legacy 200 Years After’, an international conference hosted by the Instituto de Estudos de Literatura Tradicional and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa on 21–23 June. The call for papers requested presentations “on all aspects of the Grimms’ tales and their legacy, from a number of distinct perspectives”. “Since 1812, the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM), translated in dozens of languages and read by children and adults everywhere, became the quintessential book of fairy tales,” it said. ‘It also provided an enduring, if controversial, paradigm for folktale studies. As the bicentenary of the publication of KHM approaches, we invite scholars to appraise its significance today.” The conference lived up to its high standard. “This open-ended call for papers brought to Lisbon around 70 scholars from America and Eurasia to discuss the Grimm legacy,” said Francisco Vaz da Silva, the conference organiser. “The international and trans-disciplinary nature of this gathering of scholars around a specific topic turned out to be a success.
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“We got inspiring talks, fruitful debates, and a genial atmosphere. As a result of this meeting of scholars from widely different academic traditions, who were curious about each other and able to inspire one another, I foresee fresh collaborations and enhanced scholarly synergies in the near future.”
The conference opened on Thursday with a keynote by Sadhana Naithani (Jawaharlal Nehru University), who offered a history of Jacob Grimm’s contribution to the development of philology as a discipline. Starting with Grimm’s image of language as a flowering wilderness, Naithani contrasted Grimm’s Romantic views of “wild philology”, derived from dynamic interacting with living language, with those of Karl Lachmann. Naithani speculated that Grimm’s “wild philology” may offer the discipline a way forward in the 21st century. Christine Shojaei Kawan (Enzklopädie des Märchens) then lectured on the textual developments in KHM. She presented a careful textual study of several tales, comparing the Grimms’ transcripts with the edited versions and contrasting these with other stories in the same tale type. The picture that emerged showed the Grimms as canny, intelligent editors and scholars, not always correct in their editorial decisions but painstaking and consistent in a way that has set a standard for folklore studies. The morning concluded with a keynote by Maria Tatar (Harvard). Tatar discussed how tales allow for a “creative deconstruction” whereby they can be reassembled or dismantled according to the needs of a social situation or particular storyteller. She used ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as a case study, exam ining how portrayals of beastliness and beauty have developed, subverted, and counter-indicated each other from classical literature, through the Grimms, to the present day. The afternoon saw 25 papers presented in concurrent panels, with topics diverse as chromaticism, the Grimmification of narrative, the biological significance of frogs in metamorphosis, and forms of orality in Newfoundland.
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Despite the tightly filled schedule, delegates were afforded plenty of occasions to explore Lisbon. Popular events included a guided walking tour of the city, a fado night off the tourist trail in Alfama, a sailing trip along the Tagus estuary, and – unofficially – live screenings of Portugal’s 1-0 victory over the Czech Republic in Euro 2012.
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Friday continued the series of keynote lectures. Valdimar Hafstein (University of Iceland) addressed the “domain of collective creativity” which the Grimms established. Hafstein highlighted the inherent tension between folklore, which belongs to a culture at large, and the authorship of a folklore collection, which is often individual. To whom, he asked, does a body of tales belong? Hafstein set his discussion within the legal and practical tension between copyright and public domain, and the overarching question of intellectual property.
Jack Zipes (University of Minnesota) addressed the neglected subject of cooperation in fairy tales. Zipes began with “How Six Made Their Way in the World”, which he called “revolutionarily comic”, to show how the motif of cooperation can be employed both as wish-fulfilment and political subversion by oppressed peoples. He then traced this motif historically, from the Argonautica to X-Men, and tied this to mimetic theories about why cooperation works, and why it appears in stories. Donald Haase (Wayne State University) gave the concluding keynote, discussing cultural depictions and appropriations of the Brothers Grimm themselves. Examining pop-cultural expressions from a wide variety of media, Haase traced their metamorphosis from benign patriarchal figures, through their use as nationalist symbols in the Third Reich, to more sinister postwar depictions of
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the late 20th century. Haase put forward several texts which seem to demonstrate that in the past decade more benevolent depictions of the Grimms have returned, often enough as guides for indivi duals’ self-realisation. The Friday afternoon panel sessions included papers on fairy tale pedagogy and queer readings of the tales. In addition, Zipes chaired a screening of two film adaptations of ‘Hansel and Gretel’: Christoph Hochhäusler’s ‘Milchwald’ (2004) and Yim Phil-Sung’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ (2006). The screenings were followed with a roundtable discussion by Pauline Greenhill (University of Winnipeg), Vanessa Joosen (University of Antwerp), Tatar, and Zipes. The discussion used the sharp aesthetic and structural contrasts between the films to accentuate their curious handling of the source material. The presentation of children – whether as sympathetic or threatening figures, or a combination of both – provided a key topic, as did the gender reversal of the witch in both films. Final panel sessions were held on Saturday morning. Topics included filmic adaptations of the Grimms’ tales from Disney to pornography and back again, regional variants of tale types in KHM, and cross-genre retellings.
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The conference concluded with a farewell dinner. Haase proposed a toast to the conference organisers, expressing the delegates’ appreciation not only for the intellectual quality of the conference, but also for the efficiency and seeming effortlessness with which the conference was run. Ulrich Marzolph (Georg-August University) also rose to acknowledge da Silva’s unique and important contributions to folklore studies, and declared the conference to be an historic watershed for the discipline.
Good News for Jane
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riends of the Sussex Centre will be delighted to hear that former Sussex Centre Assistant Dr Jane Carroll has been appointed to the post of Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton. Jane will be moving over from Trinity College Dublin where she has been teaching this last academic year. Roehampton is just down the road from Chichester (certainly compared with Dublin!), so we look forward to seeing Jane at some Sussex Centre events. And in a double whammy, Jane’s first book, Landscape in Children’s Literature, has just been published by Routledge. We look forward to reviewing it in Gramarye!
Tolkien: The Forest and the City Dr Jane Carroll to present paper Former Sussex Centre Assistant Dr Jane Carroll will present a paper called ‘On the Edge of Ruin: Unexpected Pleasures in Unexpected Places in The Lord of the Rings’ at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin’s Conference on ‘Tolkien: The Forest and the City’. The conference will run on 21st – 22nd September 2012.
Registration and Fee: Conference Registration fee of €50 will cover conference pack, reception, tea and coffee, and a discount on the conference proceedings volume to be published by Four Courts Press. For conference program and registration forms, please contact Dr H. Conrad-O’Briain at conrado@tcd.ie For more information visit the School of English, Trinity College Dublin’s website.
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Feedback
Please contact Heather Robbins (h.robbins@chi.ac.uk) with any suggestions or feedback