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Author
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Comment
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LupoRosso
Registered User
(2/11/03 1:18:11 pm)
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Subtle distinctions: fairy tale, fable, etc.
I would love to gain a richer understanding of the distinction between some of these forms:
1) Fairy tale.
2) Fable.
3) Fabula.
4) Morality play.
and there may be other, related, forms that I am ignorant of.
I'm curious about the distinguishing characteristics. What makes one story a fable and another a fairy tale?
If anyone could recommend references, either online or print, that would be tremendously helpful.
Thanks!
Alan Lattimore
http://www.aLattimore.com |
Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(2/12/03 12:49:47 am)
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links
www.surlalunefairytales.c...ition.html
You might also want a look at Stith Thompson's _The Folktale_ and the Joseph Campbell introduction to the Routledge edition of the Complete Grimms' Fairy Tales, both of which attempt to make distinctions.
Generally speaking, fable is linked to animal tales, like those of aesop, and are more overtly allegorical than fairy tales. However the distinction is not as clear cut as we would like it to be, as many "fairy tales" feature animal protagonists.
Fabula is latin for discourse, and is used in literary criticism to refer to the actual events that take place in a narrative. It is opposed with the term sjuzet, or surface, which refers to the way that the event is represented through a narrative medium. If you take as an example a text that plays with representing time, like memento, you could say on the basic level that the fabula is "man loses memory, kills other man", even though the film is told backwards so it looks more like "kills other man, man loses memory". (Its 8.45 in the morning, so i apologise if that doesn't make much sense, but i've not imbibed enough caffeine).
Hayden White is, I think inspired by this term when he opposes the chronicle, which is a list of dates, with historiography, which is how those dates are arranged in a narrative. For example, instead of "1914: Assassination of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand" you get "It was a tragic event in the Arch Dukes life, that his chauffer didn't know the correct route".
The word fable is derived from fabula, so the relation between the two in English is problematic. In these, and other matters of structuralist literary criticism, i recommend a book by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan called_Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics_ or Keith Green and Jill Lebihan's _Critical Theory & Practice: A coursebook_.
A morality play is a play that is designed to illustrate morality. I'm not sure what else you want to know about it?
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(2/12/03 9:07:20 am)
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genres redux
I'm not exactly sure if your question is aimed at literary fairy tales (the subject of the surlalune link), or the typological categories used to label folk narratives. On the subject of the latter, I highly recommend starting with Dan Ben-Amos' article in the book FOLKLORE GENRES edited by him -- the article is called something like "Analytical categories and ethnic genres."
A note on Hayden White's abovementioned distinction, which is not, I think, intended to refer to the analytical categories of the literary critic (or folklorist). He is interested in the different ways in which people (at different times, in different contexts, in different cultures) model and experience time and the past -- he wouldn't use the word, but the these different culture- and time-specific modes of history would be ethnogenerically (having internal cultural reality) and not just analytically distinct. For a taste of White w/o diving into a large tome, you can hunt up his article "The value of narrativity in the representation of reality," in ON NARRATIVE, WJT Mitchell ed., U Chicago Press (originally published in CRITICAL INQUIRY, vol 4., no 1 or 4). The volume is an interesting one regardless -- includes a piece by Ursula leGuin among others.
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(2/12/03 12:14:34 pm)
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oops
Sorry to be misleading, I just got carried away. White isn't talking about literature or folklore, but is using an analytical procedure inspired by lit crit and structuralism (or poetics, as he calls it) in particular to talk about historiography. Interesting stuff though, if you're writing in my area.
I've read a couple of his tomes, and I believe that remark was a paraphrasal from tropics of discourse.
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(2/12/03 7:29:08 pm)
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Off-topic of discourse
Hi, Kevin,
What is your area?
I'm an anthropologist by training, and my interests in indigenous myth and cosmology, ethnohistory & the contact experience, and, oddly, science fiction have been converging in the direction of historiographical and metahistorical questions...
Judith
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LupoRosso
Registered User
(2/12/03 9:51:19 pm)
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Re: genres redux
Judith and Kevin--
Thanks to both of you. I was able to find many of the titles you mentioned at the local university library. I hope it helps, and I'm certain to learn something along the way.
Alan Lattimore
http://www.aLattimore.com |
Gregor9
Registered User
(2/13/03 5:46:06 am)
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Re: Off-topic of discourse
Judith is failing to mention, however, that she's also an extremely fine writer of narratives of both fantasy and science fiction, and has a short story collection just out from Small Beer Press, called LORD STINK, and which utilizes her familiarity with Native American culture to great effect in the title story.
Greg
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Judith
Berman
Registered User
(2/13/03 9:37:31 am)
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Missed your sig
Yo Alan!
Good to see you on the board. I completely missed your signature in my earlier reading of the thread.
You going to tell us what you are working on right now??
Judith
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Kevin
Smith
Registered User
(2/13/03 11:08:09 am)
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...
Hi Judith.
I'm midway through a PhD titled "The Intertextual use of the Fairy Tale in Postmodern Fictions". Or something of that ilk, hence my interest in White (among others).
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LupoRosso
Registered User
(2/13/03 3:11:20 pm)
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Re: Missed your sig
Judith -
Good to be here! I've been trying to get access to the forums based on your suggestion, but everytime I tried, I'd get 404'd. So I'd wait a while, then try again.
1) The Reason for Interest
I'm a relatively inexperienced writer who had the honor a submitting a short work for discussion, resulting in a lively roundtable about how it clearly wasn't a story, but was either a) a fable or b) a fairy tale.
Then (shudder) they asked me to solve the dispute.
After listening to the discussion, I was pretty sure, in an "I know Art when I see it" way, that I had written an imperfect fable.
But it also left me wanting to formalize my understanding of what a fable is; what a fairy tale is, etc.
I, of course, starting by asking the participants in the discussion "What is a fable? What makes something a fairy tale?" but the answers I received (stunned looks) didn't help my understanding much.
2) What am I working on?
Well, being the contrary cuss that I am, the information that the market for fairy tales (other than re-writes of the classics) was non-existant, and the market for fable was worse, I decided that it was time to come up with some "new" ones...
Alan Lattimore
http://www.aLattimore.com |
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