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SLFK 211 - SECOND WRITING REQUIREMENT PAPER TOPICS
One very good suggestion is that you consult with one of us before you start writing and during the process of working on your paper. Students tend to pick topics that are too large. Have one of us help you narrow things down. Students who consult consistently write better papers.
PAPER FORMAT
This is a formal paper. I expect you to document according to a nationally accepted standard. You may use endnotes rather than footnotes. You may give author and page in parentheses in the text with a full bibliography at the end. As I said, any nationally accepted standard will do. You must have both notes and a bibliography.
If you use oral sources, you must credit these just as you would a printed source. Give name of the person from whom you recorded your information; date and place information collected; name of collector. If the collector is you, note this in the introduction or the first time a citation of an oral source appears. Sometimes the age, sex, race, social position of the person from whom you collected is relevant. Check with one of us if in doubt. If the material is secret or if the person interviewed does not want his or her identity divulged for some reason, state this at the beginning. Give all information as above, but omit name. You may need to give age, socioeconomic position, etc. as before. Do so if it is relevant, but does not reveal identity. Again, check with one of us.
SOME POSSIBLE TOPICS: On the assumption that your collection project will focus on legends, most of my topic suggestions focus on tales. If you have a legend topic you would like to explore, I am happy to consider it. Please check with me before beginning your work.
1. Try a Haney analysis, looking for the meaning of tale figure that he does not treat at length, perhaps one of the animals in animal tales rather than magic tales. You might look at the meaning of transformations. What do witch's daughters turn into as they escape from pursuit by a villain? Are male transformations different? In what sorts of objects are the transposed souls of Koshchei and other villains hidden? Is there some pattern to the objects chosen? You should pick one item, character, or action. This topic will work best if you have had other Slavic folklore and culture courses and already have some idea of the Slavic folk symbolic system.
2. Bettelheim analyses the sequence of child development and draws parallels between folktales and certain stages in the development of a child. Take tales that you liked as a child, or do the same for a friend or family member. Analyze the tales according to Bettelheim. Is the interpretation you get valid for the person whose favorite tales you are using? If so, what information does this analysis give you about the person? What information does it give you about fairytales and their function? If the interpretation is not valid, why not &endash; where might the analysis or the theory be in error?
3. Another Bettelheim possibility is to apply his theories to Russian tales. Bettelheim claims that he is presenting common human values, values that are not culturally determined. Yet, as you will see, some of his animal husband theories do not apply to Russian tales. Take some coherent body of Russian tales (and we can help you chose such a body); analyze according to Bettelheim and see how well his theories work.
4. You can apply Bettelheim to popular narratives for children. Again, select some one body of material that has consistency and unity. Describe. Analyze according to Bettelheim. What developmental needs does this material meet? Which ones does it ignore? Can you find a correlation between the commercial success of an item and the degree to which it is tale-like and fulfills the developmental functions described by Bettelheim?
5. Again taking off from Bettelheim, look at sex role socialization. What roles are being taught to boys and what roles are being taught to girls? You can start with a body of children's narrative and then look at something like commercials or toys and see if the gender role messages are reinforced by the toys or commercials.
6. Zipes finds authorial intent in the presentation of folklore in print and commercial intent in the presentation of folklore in popular media, especially by Walt Disney. If you would care to look into the background behind a Disney film or a cartoon series and discuss the manipulation of folklore, by all means do so. Again, check with one of us to make sure that you have a manageable topic.
7. Taking off from Zipes again, I have no objection to your looking at various adaptations of famous tales. Beauty and the Beast has been done and redone again and again. So has Cinderella. Take several versions and compare. How are they similar and how are they different? How do the fit the social and historical situation in which they were created?
8. Again taking off from Zipes, you might want to look at the work of a single author, especially a children's author such as Roald Dahl or Dr. Seuss. Are Dr. Seuss stories tale-like? If not, do they share other traits with tales that might account for their appeal. Roald Dahl has done some modifications of classic tales as well as writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. You might want to compare his adaptations of tales to his non-tale-based stories.
There are many, many other analyses of folklore in general and the folktale in particular. You are welcome to write about one of these.
1. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale. A famous Russian folklorist whose work made an enormous splash when it was translated into English some 40 years ago. What Propp did was abstract a pattern which characterizes all magic tales. He abstracted it from the tales in Afanas'ev. But it has since been shown to apply to tales in many other cultures. What is even more interesting is that it applies very well indeed to successful films such as Star Wars and to successful written literature, such as Lord of the Rings. You are welcome to read Propp and to try a Proppian analysis of an item of popular culture, such as a film. Be sure to discuss this with me. Proppian analysis appear simple, but is not.
2. Carl G. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious or the works of Marie von Franz on tales. Many people, including George Lucas of Star Wars fame and Jim Henson (Muppets, Dark Crystal) are Jungians. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious might be a bit much to handle, but you can try Man and his Symbols or Four Archetypes and try Jungian analyses of either tales or popular culture, such as film.
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