Kristiana Willsey’s upcoming online lecture on November 15, 5 p.m. (CET) is titled Stone Soup: Fairy Tale Studies and Controversies over Authenticity.
Join the Zoom Meeting here!
Meeting ID: 878 3128 7811
Abstract
Questions over authenticity strike at the core of generic definitions: what “counts” as a fairy tale? If folk narratives do not “belong” to genres but are rather uses of them, scholars are storytellers too, and debates over our object of study are fundamentally disputes over how fairy tales should be used: are fairy tales best understood as evidence of cultural continuity over time, and thus of national identity? Are they political science, tools for powerless people to imagine better worlds, or (conversely) culturally conservative texts that prove the folk’s own acceptance of hierarchies of class and gender? Are fairy tales the forgotten philosophies of oral cultures, or exaggerated fragments of lost history, or psychology, necessary for the development of children’s minds? This talk will review the history of controversies over authenticity in fairy tale studies, tracing the way these debates have continually driven the study of fairy tales away from claims of purity (of origin, of medium, of function), towards an understanding of the genre as hybrid, transnational, transmedial, and transformative. Like the “stone soup” of ATU 1548, authenticity is a social process, not a magic stone at the bottom of the pot.
Short biography
Kristiana Willsey is a lecturer in the Anthropology Department of the University of Southern California. She received a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University in 2014, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published research articles in the Journal of American Folklore, Poetics Today, Humanities, and various edited scholarly volumes.
