Professor: Dorothee Ostmeier

credits 4.00

• CRN 22681: Monday & Wednesday, 4:00-5:50pm @ PET 102

Crossing cultural, social and genre boundaries, fairy and fantasy tales have always been vibrant sources for revisions and exploration of controversial issues, utopias/dystopias, class and gender struggles, child abuse, civil rights etc. We will study the cross/trans-cultural connections between popular fairy tales and their revisions in various contemporary media, and examine the transitions from marvelous to uncanny, surrealistic, weird fantasy tales, from Romanticism to Now, including contemporary texts by Ann Sexton, Francesca Leah Block, and the discussions of lithographs by artist Peregrine Honig. Our discussions will be framed by investigations of theory of fantasy by Walter Benjamin, Tzvetan Todorov, Mark Fischer, Donna Haraway et al.
Students will give brief oral presentation introducing an author, a period, or a theoretical concept, write two analytical papers and work on a creative storytelling project, individually or collectively. The sky for your creativity (story, podcast, video, interviews, for example) is limitless.

Graduation Requirement:  This class will fulfill an Arts and Letters Colloquium and the Global Perspectives (GP) cultural literacy requirement.  If a student already has completed an Arts and Letters Colloquium, this course will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and the Global Perspectives (GP) cultural literacy requirement.