Definitely Relevant

"The Wolftrap: Into the Woods with Fairy Tales"

Thursday, September 17, 2015 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

Room 165 Thompson Library

Fairy tales are known to have a high coefficient of weirdness, and their tropes feature prominently in the anxieties of figures ranging from Freud’s Wolfman to Alan Turing.   Although these stories appear to have migrated from the childhood of culture into the culture of childhood, they continue to haunt the adult imagination.  What accounts for the cultural tenacity of a “simple story” like “Little Red Riding Hood”?  What kinds of vexing contradictions and unintelligible truths lurk beneath the intelligible surfaces?  We will trace the path of the girl made famous by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm and interrogate what happens when that path bifurcates into children’s stories and adult entertainments. 

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures.  She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children’s Literature. She is most recently author of The Annotated Peter Pan(W. W. Norton & Co., 2011) and Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (W. W. Norton & Co., 2009)

Co-sponsored with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Center for Folklore Studies.