MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Fairy tales are a battleground in twenty-first century American culture. Hundreds enter the cultural space each year and are met with both acclaim and censure. Even as they proliferate in children’s picture books, in young adult fantasy novels, in popular literature, and on screens, they are subject to harsh critiques in parenting advice publications, religious discourse, and feminist scholarlship. This paper is based on a monograph project that explores this cultural moment in which we censure fairy tales even as we consume them, a phenomenon which has been underexamined in scholarly literature to date.

The overarching argument of the monograph is that in an increasingly secular and pluralistic American society, fairy tales form a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among the diverse peoples who live here. Further, this work challenges the censure heaped upon the genre, arguing that the fantastic is as legitimate response to modernity as the absurd and the surrealist, arguing that fairy-tale adaptations and retellings should be examined alongside and in conversation with the canonical literary and cinematic texts of the long twentieth century. This work is an argument for the inclusion of fairy tale narratives in the academic canon of contemporary literature.

The presentation I’m proposing for MAPACA 2018 will focus on the twenty-first century innovation of fairy-tale pastiche, a subset I have identified within Ingeborg Hoesterey’s category of cinematic pastiche. These visual texts appropriate the building blocks of fairy tales to create wholly new tales that problematize the definition of fairy tale even as they remain within the genre. These texts are able to simultaneously participate in the broad fairy tale tradition while also commenting on some of its norms: pastoral image of nature, patriarchal control of the family, and marriage without real choice.