Profs and Pints Online presents: “Fairy Tales as American Scripture,” a look at how such stories guide our nation, with Kate Koppy, author of Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them.

[ This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access. ]

One can find fairy tales everywhere in U.S. culture these days. That includes both the familiar stories that we tell over and over and the new ones that we’ve created from familiar pieces. They’re depicted in movies and on television, they’re riffed on in music and advertising, and they’re even commonly referenced in news headlines.

Their huge influence and market share is a two-edged sword. Even as they offer audiences an opportunity to imagine new worlds, new systems, and new social structures, they also repeat and reinforce present inequalities. Fairy tale heroes adventure into new worlds, but they always return home. They bring incremental change to the systems they inhabit, but they have rarely been radical.

You’ll see your own world in a new light after watching fairy tales discussed by Professor Kate Koppy, who has studied and taught the ways that narratives help build and maintain community as a former visiting assistant professor of composition and literature at Marymount University and a current instructor at Moscow’s New Economic School.

She’ll look at how fairy tales influence us, explore how we use these tales of imagined lives to make sense of our own lives and of current events and discuss the intersection of the stories we tell and the identities we create.

Among the questions Professor Koppy will tackle: Why, exactly, are fairy tales so prevalent? Why are the Americanized versions of fairy tales so much less dark and bloody than the ones originally read and told in the Old World?  Can fairy tales be feminist?

Profs & Pints Online: Fairy Tales as American Scripture