Browsing by Subject "fairy tales"

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    Reading Agency: The Making of Modern German Childhoods in the Age of Revolutions
    (2015-07) Bruce, Emily
    This dissertation demonstrates how active reading and writing became a defining feature of childhood during the age of revolutions. Beginning in educated middle-class families at the end of the Enlightenment and disseminating across European society by the end of the nineteenth century, a series of radical transformations occurred in the ideologies and practices of childhood: as a life stage, it was increasingly positioned as critical to self-formation; adults began to worry about entertaining children in active ways; sentimental attitudes influenced children’s learning; and at the same time, pedagogues and parents emphasized the cultivation of self-discipline. Pedagogical innovations, the development of new book genres and markets, and an increased emphasis on bourgeois domesticity joined to make German-speaking Central Europe a vital site for reimagining childhood. The development of modern childhood has traditionally been understood as a process enacted on youth by adults, but in practice children’s socialization was mediated by young people’s own choices. To better understand the roles children played in transformations of modern life, there is now a need for studies which combine the history of changing sentiments with the history of children’s lived experience. In addition to the ideas and practices of pedagogues and family educators, we also must consider the part children played. Rather than dismissing the disciplinary aspects of pedagogy or overlooking the power of children to influence adults, my approach emphasizes the mutual constitution of agency and discipline in determining how children influenced European modernity. Reading Agency furthermore shows how children participated in inventing the modern self. I argue that the emergence of the active child reader and writer was not simply a consequence of expanding literacy, but, in fact, a key constituent of modern life. The dissertation is organized as a series of case studies in literacy practices—youth periodicals, fairy tales, geographic schoolbooks, children’s letters, and youth diaries—which each demonstrate the complex and socially embedded ways in which children form opinions, exercise power, and make history.
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    Through the Woods: documenta, Fairy Tales, and the Time of Enchantment
    (2019-07) López Prater, Erika
    Every five years, the town of Kassel, Germany hosts the contemporary art exhibition, documenta, an event that is a product of the post-WWII period and which began as a reaction against Nazi-era visual politics. In the early nineteenth century in the same town, the Brothers Grimm collected the fairy tales for which they are famous, and published Children’s- and Household Tales. This dissertation reads the disparate histories of these two major institutions of Kassel together in order to explore how documenta itself functions as a kind of fairy tale – one that both transforms and haunts, and has the potential to rehabilitate but also to harm. Employing an experimental historiography that draws from both the historical methods of artists and fairy tales, this dissertation argues that the fairy tale themes of magic, transformation, and repetition are integral to documenta – an event that is rooted in trauma and recovery. This project is thematic in its approach, and as such is not meant to serve as an exhaustive overview of documenta, nor does it endeavor to catalogue every occurrence of fairy tale art that has been present at the event. Rather, it brings two disparate bodies of literature into conversation with each other. Additionally, the artwork case studies that each of the chapters are based upon are not based upon pre-existing fairy tales, but this dissertation argues the artworks function as fairy tales. Chapter 1 examines the relationship between the first documenta in 1955 and the Nazi exhibition, “Degenerate Art” from 1937, in order to examine the curatorial innovations and shortcomings that undergird documenta. Chapter 2 looks at Joseph Beuys’s monumental environmental artwork 7000 Oaks and interprets it as a work that, through its metamorphosis, promotes both mourning and regeneration. Chapter 3 seeks out the ghosts that haunt Kassel and non-teleological forms of storytelling, through the case study of Stan Douglas’s Suspiria. Chapter 4 takes Mariam Ghani’s A Brief History of Collapses to think through both documenta’s relationship with iconoclasm and an enchanted, repetitive form temporality that allow it to imagine better possible futures and radical forms of empathy.