ENG 222 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Print Culture

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: English
• Course: ENG 222
• Professor: Andrew O' Malley

Document Summary

Social structure in pre-modern europe: great chain of being (social and nature) Material conditions of peasants: poverty, powerlessness, lack of control, imminence of death. Social conditions + material conditions = lottery mentality worldview: success/social advancement comes from: Luck: wit, windfall, beauty (females), strength, magic (making the impossible happen) Trying to demystify the fairy-tale: origins, history, circumstances of production rendered mysterious. Folk tale = symbolic abstraction: aspirations, desires, needs, frustrations, lived experience (injustice, anger, poverty) abstracted (shrunk down and made abstract ) into a symbolic story. Fairy-tale (in print) = appropriated (stolen) folk tale (by elite print culture) Stolen recodified (basic structure retained, but surface details changed to suit new audience: new audience: french upper class (perrault), german middle-class children (grimms) Literary tales: beauty and the beast, the white cat: salon tale: 17th & 18th century, written in france, d"aulnoy: rich. Appropriation of folk motifs, elements, situations: adapted to upper-class audience, zipes: instrumentalized tales .