(The picture above is from Lore and Saga, a British site for teachers and museum educators.)Monday we covered the folktale, a part of world literature that draws on orality, local traditions, and the art of storytelling. We looked at European and Native American folktales. The European folktales were Charles Perrault's "Donkey Skin" (1697 -- long 18th century) and the Brothers Grimm's "All Kinds of Fur" (1819 -- 19th century). The Native American folktales were "Coyote and Bull" and "Coyote and the Mallard Ducks" (Nez Perce) as well as "Coyote and Eagle Go to the Land of the Dead" (Wishram) and "The Wolf Tricks the Coyote Trickster" (Shoshone). We also discussed Gerald Vizenor's "Shadows" (1994), a literary short story that examines storytelling (Bagese's game of wanaki and her mistrust of writing) and I.B. Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" (1945), a short story that one might mistake for a folktale.
Here are the videos that I would have liked to have shown in class!
Here are links to the videos I wanted to show today. The first is a link to one of the more politically correct Bugs Bunny cartoons.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM5Gwzk3Vfc
The next pits Bugs against Wile E. Coyote.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr47amcDU4I
Now here are videos of the storytellers. The first is Len Cabral, a New England storyteller whom I've seen perform.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhoYeJPNC88
Robert Clements' performance also includes music and song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beYSvSOe1K0
Here is a video from the Manchester Museum in the UK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQXOR-KZxO4
Gregg Howard is a Cherokee storyteller:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlHtzU133NI
A schoolteacher videotaped a shadow play that he put on for his students. BTW, he said that the Coyote Tales were for the winter time only. Was that why we had our computer problems today?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjUlyarH9F0
How do these videos help you understand Monday's folktales more?
Below is a picture of a Lakota storyteller, Kevin Locke. He also performs the hoop dance and traditional Lakota flute songs. He is based in South Dakota, and the picture below is from The South Dakota Arts Council's web site.
Below is a picture of Chief Joseph, a Nez Perce chief who figures in US History. The picture is from the website of Dr. Daniel N. Paul, a journalist and historian from the Mi'Kmaq.
Tuesday we watched two of the storytelling videos in class (Len Cabral and the shadow play). The shadow play was held at a school on the Navajo reservation, so it adds another culture to our mix. The Navajo, by the way, were raiders...kind of like their Coyote.
We then moved on to poetry, focusing on masculinity and femininity. The poems we discussed included the excerpts from Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino, Anne Sexton's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Bettina Judd's very recent "Gender Bend/Sankofa," Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California," and Emily Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz." We also listened to Anne Sexton's "Her Kind":
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15297
I wish I could find a picture of Anne Sexton with her backup band, "Her Kind"!
Recently, Ms. Sexton has been the subject of an opera. For more information about this opera, see the blog entry below:
http://www.scene4.com/karrenlalondealenier/2007/04/transformations_an_opera_that_1.html
We won't be able to listen to Walt Whitman reading "I Hear America Singing," but here are a few links to others reading it. The first reader is Garrison Keillor.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2002/07/04
The other is poet Billy Collins.
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.100010968/default.html
The picture below is Thomas Eakins' painting of Walt Whitman. I found it at Washington College's web site.
Here are links to the versions of Snow White that we looked at. The first version is from 1812.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html#snowwhite
The other is from 1857.
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html
Finally, here is a synopsis of Disney's Snow White (1937).
http://www.filmsite.org/snow.html
The illustration below is from 1911, predating Disney's film by a few years. It is from Heidi Anne Heiner's site, SurLaLune Fairy Tales.
By the way, after doing a little research, I found out that Okot p'Bitek's mother's name was Lawino and that she encouraged his interest in Acholi culture. Below is a picture of an Acholi courtship dance from John Paul Aporu's web site. Mr. Aporu is a Ugandan currently studying in Austria.
If you would like to learn more about Okot p'Bitek's life, here are a few good sites:
http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/cm/africana/pbitek.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pbitek.htm
By the way, both of his daughters are writers as well. In 2008, Jane Musoke-Nteyafas interviewed his younger daughter, Juliane Bitek.
http://ugpulse.com/articles/daily/Literature.asp?id=997
The picture below is from the web site of Robert de Beaugrande, a linguistics professor, most recently at a university in Slovenia.
Wednesday we continued discussing poetry, focusing on representations of childhood as well as on form and content. When focusing on representations of childhood, I asked the following questions:
-- what light do representations of childhood shed on the author's culture?
-- what light do representations of childhood shed on the author's time period?
-- what light do representations of childhood shed on genre?
The poems covered in class were Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night" (a villanelle), Gwendolyn Brooks' "the rites for cousin vit" (a sonnet), Philip Levine's "M. Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfee Intermediate School, Detroit 1942," Charles Simic's "The Prodigy," William Blake's "Holy Thursday" (from Songs of Experience), and E. Ethelbert Miller's "Looking for Omar." For more information about the villanelle, see this link:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5796
For more information about the sonnet, see this link:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sonnet.html
And if you'd like to see an example of Edgar Degas' work, here is his Ballet Dancers in the Wings (1900), which I found on Wikipedia. The medium is pastel rather than paint.
In addition, we watched two presentations. Tiffany's topic was Taiwan and its culture; Julie's was Cambodia. The first picture is of a night market in Taipei, also from Wikipedia.
Below is a picture of Angkor Wat, Cambodia's capital during the Khmer Empire. This picture is also from Wikipedia.
Thursday was our last day. For the most part, it was devoted to preparation and presentations. James and his cousin gave a presentation on Liberia, specifically its civil war and its effects on the nation. Here is a link to the video that they showed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMyo2SUm4Y
As James mentioned, this video covers both sides of the conflict: the rebel army (LURD) and President Charles Taylor's. Individuals from both sides are interviewed, and you get to hear the child soldiers psych themselves up.
The picture below is from Every Day Should Be Saturday, which is generally a blog about football. The blog's author, Orson Swindle (aka Spencer Hall), however, works in International Affairs, which probably explains the photo from Liberia.
Young presented on A Doll's House, focusing on Ibsen's career and introducing us to a new modern adaptation.
Then Xirui and Ming presented on Chinese Wu Shu or martial arts. The schools that they focused on were Nanquan, Tong Bei Quan, O Mei Quan, and Tai Chi Quan. They also discussed Wuxia, a type of fiction about martial arts adventures and showed us clips of theatrical and film adaptations of these works. The picture of a graphic novel illustration below is from Wikipedia.
We also discussed Ruben Dario's poems "To Roosevelt" and "Walt Whitman." Note that he wrote "Walt Whitman" much earlier. The painting below is of Theodore Roosevelt, and it is also from Wikipedia.
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