3/5/09. Sleeping Beauty as Metaphor for the Holocaust: Jane Yolen’s  Brier Rose

Film Clip: Cartoons Go To War (Disney Studios in WWII) + The Führer’s Face  + Disney Propaganda/ Educational shorts

Lecture: Yolen’s Briar Rose
Jane Yolen: (Zipes, Myth, “Contemp American”)

Story:  “The 13th Fay” (Sleeping Beauty Tale)

In-Class Writing Assignment: Wrtitten response to Yolen's Briar Rose. For those in-class: writing assignment. For make-ups: 1-2 page written response. Please hand in hard cory.

Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992):

1. Grimms’/Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty is used as a vehicle for addressing the atrocities of the Nazis during the Holocaust.
2. Discussion in Germany after WWII: Can one write poetry after the Holocaust? (Adorno), Can an author depict what happened in the camps in any form other than memoirs? Does writing a fictional account trivialize the enormity of the crimes against humanity perpetrated in the death camps?
3. What happens if you take the fairy tale’s capacity to speak the unspeakable and apply that to the experience of the camps? Can this justaposition of children’s form and adult horror work? Does the Holocaust demand a form like this? Does the black/white depiction of good & evil work here? Are the good rewarded and the bad punished? Is there closure at the end? A happy ending? Marriage?
4. Is this a book for young adults or adults?

Final Film Clip: Daffy the Commando