 "Photo: Christina Deparis")
Once thought to be the stuff of childhood memories, fairy tales have brought a little grown-up magic to UCF students with the “Fairy Tales: From Disney to Grimms to Beyond” course offered in the Burnett Honors College.
“Fairy tales persist because they are short, gripping stories that are able to be re-told over generations,” said Kevin Yee, who has taught the honors course for the past four semesters. “What keeps people captivated are the different spins that can be made to the stories, while the morals can be lost for entertainment purposes.”
This spring, a group of 20 honor students looked back on some beloved and not-so-beloved fairy tales to uncover their origins, culture and the psychology behind the fascination with these stories.
Yee said the purpose of the class is to teach critical thinking and problem solving in the context of teaching students “not to consume cultural artifacts.”
He said the course helps students analyze the world around them and offers a philosophy to think differently about everything they’ve experienced and will experience. Yee has a Ph.D. in German Literature, with fairy tales as part of his expertise.
“It’s not all about revising your childhood impressions, but about seeing things in a new and complex light,” Yee said.
In the course, students studied fairy tales mostly from Europe, with particular emphasis on major authors such as Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.
While studying these tales, they would compare and contrast the classic versions of the tales (for example, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and the Little Mermaid) with the Disney film versions in a variety of “lenses,” or angles of study.
The fairy tales were analyzed in a variety of angles including Freudian, literary, historical, feminist, biblical and Marxist, Yee said.
“By comparing and contrasting classic European fairy tales to modern tales, such as Disney classics, I learned about longevity of storytelling and the emergence and change of fairy tales in popular culture,” said Sylvana Fernandez, a senior double-majoring in advertising/public relations and film.
“There are so many complex layers to these stories that people assume are simple since they tend to be read to children, but all my reading and research on the tales led to a lot of discoveries and changed my perspective on their value and significance,” Fernandez said.
In the class, students were given a variety of reading and writing assignments where they were asked to review literary articles and interpret the tales by writing theses of agreement or disagreement on their context or content.
Additionally, with most assignments done in groups, students looked at different authors of the same tale, and were asked to write their own fairy tales with the same style of each particular author.
“My friends would laugh and pass it off as an ‘easy’ class, but it's probably been one of the most challenging, intense and interesting courses I've taken,” Fernandez said.
For Lauren Fielding, a junior majoring in event management in the Rosen College of Hospitality Management, the course was like a “cultural gem” to her passion for storytelling and culture.
“They [fairy tales] come to us through centuries of re-tellings, and they change a little with each culture, so they provide us with a more personal understanding of their historic origins,” Fielding said. “The class encouraged us to analyze everything through many lenses. The sense of meaning, culture, and history that I walked away with is invaluable.”
Fielding said that something unexpected she found about the course was that many fairy tales were not based on fantasy, but on life lessons and morals to keep children ethical.
“Many fairy tales were told by peasants as moral lessons with very practical messages,” Fielding said. “They weren't escapist stories that encouraged children to reach for their dreams. The dream that ‘Your wish will come true’ is what we think of today, but back then, the moral was ‘You can't count on anyone but yourself, and you need a lot of luck to make it.’”
She said that her view of fairy tales has changed by not seeing them as fantasy stories, but as realities with practical messages for some cultures.
“Fairy tales are ‘Pull yourself up by your boot straps,’ not, ‘Anyone can be a princess,’” Fielding said.
Yee said he hopes the course continues to update itself with more multimedia elements beyond just films. He said he wants the interdisciplinary course to expand beyond psychological interpretations to more cultural studies.
UCF’s close proximity to Disney has not influenced why the course is being taught, Yee said. He said the course is also taught on campuses in Iowa, Minnesota and California.
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