Fairytales and the Uncanny

Fairy tales have had a remarkable career, having been told and re-told, invented and re-invented by peasants,
aristocrats, literary authors, and film studios. How have they been
appropriated and re-appropriated in oral traditions, print culture, and
on the screen, and what has happened to the genre along the way? In this
course we will read and write about fairy tales from a variety of
historical and cultural contexts. In so doing, we will practice key
elements of writing in academic and non-academic contexts: developing
and supporting a point, dialoguing with others, structuring a piece of
written work, etc. We will further consider how the fairy tale and its
conventions of magic, the supernatural, and the fantastic are
appropriated into realist and so-called high literature, giving rise to a
new aesthetic category: the uncanny.