Critical Reading
- How does the text interact with what we know? With itself? Its history? Its contexts?
Vocabulary
Legend
- Mix of story and fact.
- Often spicing up a historical fact.
- Usually about someone high up on the social ladder (saint, king, etc).
Fable
- Has a moral!
- Involves talking animals/plants.
Myths
- Explain how something came to be.
- Marvel’s Infinity saga is an example.
Folktales
- Passed through generations orally.
- Often about the specific place where it’s told.
- For example: ghost stories.
Fairy tales
- Magical elements.
- Mashup of the other forms.
- Always: a problem introduced, a problem solved.
Institutionalization
- When a fairy tale is codified from oral to written form.
- This can happen many times through a story’s history.
Contamination
- Change of content to highlight or suppress certain values.
- When something is institutionalized, it is also contaminated
- Can be on purpose or accidental
- Based on the language you speak, your experience, the surroundings, etc
- Example: the Bible’s story of Adam and Eve says “fruit”, then Milton wrote a poem about the story and realized the Latin word for evil, “malus”, also means apple, so he made the fruit an apple.
- Accidental contamination
- Now we think of it as an apple
- With fairy tales, there is no “original”. Everything is a remix of what came before it.
Story Patterns
Prohibition of something → transgression → punishment → redemption
Unity → separation → unity