Although WR courses focus primarily on academic writing, in WR 100: \u201cFairy Tales and Literature\u201d I ask students to write their own versions of a traditional fairy tale. This assignment, an \u201calternative genre\u201d second paper, allows students to understand how and why fairy tales are written from the inside, rather than simply from an outside scholarly perspective. It also reinforces the importance of narrative structure: students come to understand that just like a fairy tale, an academic paper must tell a story, although an intellectual one. The assignment has three components: an introduction to the fairy tale, meant to draw a reader into the project as a whole; the fairy tale itself; and finally an analysis in which students explain how and why they wrote their versions.<\/p>\n
Hannah Levin\u2019s \u201cBad Parenting: The True Villain of \u2018Rumpelstiltskin\u2019\u201d is a powerful retelling of \u201cRumpelstiltskin\u201d not only because it\u2019s so emotionally engaging, drawing us right into the story of the boy who was bargained away, but also because it functions as a response to, and analysis of, the Grimm version on which it\u2019s based. The most successful fairy tale retellings do just that: they talk back to their predecessors, allowing us to see the story differently. If we look at Hannah\u2019s version the way a scholar would, we can see how subtly she\u2019s responding to and reformulating themes found in the Grimm version, such as the importance of names. But now it\u2019s the boy\u2019s lack of a name that becomes central, marking his abandonment. In this tale, Hannah talks back to the Brothers Grimm, telling them what she thinks of their tale and creating a new one of her own, in clear, lyrical prose, that gives voice to a character who is too often forgotten.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u00a0THEODORA GOSS<\/strong><\/p>\n WR 100: Fairy Tales<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although WR courses focus primarily on academic writing, in WR 100: \u201cFairy Tales and Literature\u201d I ask students to write their own versions of a traditional fairy tale. This assignment, an \u201calternative genre\u201d second paper, allows students to understand how and why fairy tales are written from the inside, rather than simply from an outside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4801,"featured_media":0,"parent":9587,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9625"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9774,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9625\/revisions\/9774"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}