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With
this assignment, I am asking you to do three things:
1)Analyze
and interpret a folktale, fable, or parable that uses character and plot
in order to criticize, condemn, or correct common social attitudes,
traditions, or behaviors. You will use the URL sites I’ll be
giving you to access a folktale, fable, or parable on the Internet.
2)
You will then write a true story that describes the
same social attitude, tradition, or behavior that is described in your
chosen folktale, fable, or parable. 3)
Finally, you
will either write a brief (one page at the most) explanation of how your
own true story mirrors your chosen folktale, fable, or parable, or you
will include that explanation into the body of the story itself, just as
Victor Frankl did in the story below.
Before
I go any further in detailing this assignment, Folktales,
Fables,
and Parables
often function as Allegories, which are stories whose characters (and
sometimes their events and setting, as well) represent specific abstract
ideas or qualities. Allegory is often intended to be subversive in
nature, as it uses deceptive language to criticize those who have power
or authority over others. Folktale: A short narrative which comes from "the people" as a
whole. There is no single author. Rather, these tales have been
told out loud over and over again, usually by older people who handed
them down to younger generations. Consequently, every version of
the tale is a little different from the version that came before.
Folktales often seem to be about critical stages of life: birth,
initiation, courtship, marriage, death, and work, and amusement.
Some people argue that helping children work through their conflicts is
one of the folktale's most important functions. Another important
function of the folktale might be to criticize common social attitudes,
traditions, or behaviors. Fable:
A short, simple story with a moral lesson is a type of allegory.
The main characters in a fable are most frequently animals, though
people and objects (like trees, rocks, rivers, etc.) are also sometimes
used as central figures. The Aesopian fables emphasize the social
interactions of human beings, and the morals they draw tend to embody
advice on the best way to deal with the competitive realities of life.
With some irony, fables view the world in terms of its power structures.
Foxes and wolves, which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
called
"Everyman's metaphor" for cunning and cruelty, appear often as
characters in fables chiefly because, in the human world, such predatory
cunning and cruelty are able to get around restraints of justice and
authority. Parable:
Another kind of allegory is a story illustrating a moral, in which every
detail parallels the moral situation that has made the story necessary.
Parables do not analyze social systems so much as they remind the
listener of his beliefs. The audience hearing the parable is assumed to
share a communal truth but perhaps to have set it aside or forgotten it.
Reading
#1:
The link below will lead you to an example of how one person used a true
story and a parable, together, to explain why many German concentration
camp prisoners did not attempt to manipulate circumstance in order to
improve their chances of survival. Instead, many prisoners felt they felt they were safer
if they adopted a fatalistic attitude (i.e. they chose to let Fate
determine whether they would live or die).
Psychiatrist
Victor E. Frankl, in his book Man’s
Search for Meaning, uses a folktale to describe and explain his own
fatalistic attitude while he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp
during World War II. Click on the link below and read what he has
written: Reading
#2:
Nobel-prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, who is another concentration
camp survivor also uses allegorical parable to describe and explain why
he, as a writer, has made the choices he has made ever since World War
II. The following link will lead you to the bit of a story that he
uses just prior to beginning his novel, The
Testament (New York: Summit Books, 1981):
Reading
#3: If
Frankl and Wiesel use allegorical parable to describe and explain why
they make the choices they do, others use allegory to describe the
unjust behavior of others. In his revised and updated edition A
People’s History of the United States 1492-Present (New York:
HarperCollins
Publishers, 1995. P134), historian Howard Zinn includes the
following story to illustrate how badly the Creek Indians had been hurt
by President Andrew Jackson’s policy of removal:
Get
into teams of two and share one computer. Visit the following
websites and choose a fairy tale you wish to recreate.
You will soon see that there are LOTS to choose from!
Go back to the top to review EXACTLY what your assignment is. http://webtech.kennesaw.edu/jcheek3/fairytales.htm Folklore,
Myth and Legend http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/storfolk.html
Stories,
Folklore, and Fairy Tales Theme Page http://www.cln.org/themes/fairytales.html Language
Arts – Fables and Myths (about ¾ of the way down the page) http://exworthy.tripod.com/language.htm#Fables%20and%20Myths
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