#jack zipes

[goticoamericano]

[ijustkindalikebooks]

“Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.” ― Jack Zipes.

[adarkrainbow]

Here are a set of illustrations by Joellyn Rock for the dual release of "Beautiful Angiola" and "The Robber with the Witch's Head". Taken from here.

For a bit of context, these two books are the two parts of "The Great Treasury of Sicilian Fairy and Folk Tales", translated in English for the very first time in 2004 by Jack Zipes.

Now, if you know Jack Zipes, you might wonder how come he translates Sicilian fairytales when he is a translator of German texts and German fairytales... Well it is actually because this collection of Sicilian fairytales was originally a German collection!

They were originally collected by the German folklorist Laura Gonzenbach, and published in German. Quite the irony... Sicilian fairytales only available in German. It also explains why they were so hard to obtain for a long time.

These specific illustrations are associated with a set of twelve fairytales, which are...

"Quaddaruni and his sister" ; "Sorfarina"...

... "Don Giovanni di la Fortuna", "Prince Scursuni"...

... "The Godchild of saint Francis of Paula", "The Pig King"...

... "The Robber with a Witch's head", "Clever Peppe"...

... "The Beautiful Maiden with the Seven Veils", "The Twelve Robbers"...

... "The Wicked Schoolmaster and the Wandering Princess", "The Beautiful Anna".

While you can buy each book individually (the first volume is red, the second pale blue), you can also get the full collection in one volume, called "Beautiful Angiola: The Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach" (Not to be confused with the first volume of the collection, "Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales, Collected by Laura Gonzenbach")

[virgin-martyr]

Unnamed excerpts are by Jack Zipes!

[tabledfables]

To those shameful people who think fairy tales are nothing but foolish and trivial stories for kids, there is no hope, for it is through our imaginations and imaginative worlds that we create sound strategies not only for survival but also for the endowment of enlightenment.

Jack Zipes

[sophia-sol]

The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated and edited by Jack Zipes

I might be completely obsessed with birds these days but I haven't left behind my first love, fairy tales. I have in the past read through a complete collection of the Grimm fairy tales, but this particular collection is doing something interesting – it's a complete translated collection of the first editions of the Grimm brothers' stories. Over the course of their lives, the Grimms did a fair amount of work to edit and alter the stories to better fit what they discovered was the actual audience for these tales, and the first edition is the one that comes closest to accurately reflecting the stories as they first collected them from the traditional tellers. But it's the versions of stories that are found in later editions that everyone is familiar with today.

It's been so long since I've read the more usually available versions that I can't speak in much detail to the comparison, but it was fun to read through this collection and get a sense of some of the kinds of stories German people told in that era. It's a very readable translation, too, and the editor/translator is an expert on the topic. And I appreciated the distinctive illustrations throughout (art done in cut-paper!) even though I don't personally love the way the artist did people.

Highly recommended!

[adarkrainbow]

It proves that one musn’t trust first appearances. I never read a full book of Jack Zipes because when I began my university research about fairytales, I picked up one of his books at the very start of the research - since everybod talked about him and his work as a foundation of fairytale study. The thing however is that Jack Zipes seems to be more of an expert of all fairytales except French ones - because my research was about French literary fairytales (Perrault and the like) and what I read from his book about Perrault and d’Aulnoy and the likes was very wrong, and showed not so much a deep misunderstanding as rather a superficial understanding of what these stories and their authors were aiming at and working for. In fact, reading Zipes talk about Perrault made me understand why English-speakers interested in fairy tales had such a wrong view of French literary fairytales and how some big misunderstandings related to Perrault and d’Aulnoy and co spread so fast in countries such as the USA. 

But I keep hearing such good things and so much admiration about his work, and I discovered afterward that he was the one who created the reprint of the “Original,uncensored, first edition of the Grimm fairytales” I loved. So this further convinces me that Zipes is certainly a Grimm expert, and an expert of fairytales in their “folkloric” incarnation - and I need to read what he wrote about Grimm. But as a French who studied French fairytales, read and debated what others have written about French fairytales, and who made papers about French fairytales, I can say (and my research director also agreed to this at the time) that Jack Zipes is definitively wrong in his appreciation of French literary fairytales a la Perrault and d’Aulnoy, and I would NOT suggest his books to anyone who wants to study French fairytales. 

But for the Grimm brothers, he is certainly the man to go. 

have you ever heard of jack zipes? he's a folklorist who coined the theory of story contamination, wherein fairy tales are intentionally "contaminated" by outside additions and changed with every telling to keep them alive and enable every storyteller to connect personally with the story. when i studied an essay of his i thought it fit perfectly with your poem "locks" - the idea of a story being changed with every telling, with the new additions being cemented in as the role of storyteller passes on from parent to child. and I think it goes quite well with the quote "we owe it to each other to tell stories".

I've known Jack for twenty five years and known his work for longer. He's brilliant. He and Maria Tatar are my favourite US folktale academics.

[vqtblog]

Jack Zipes: A second gaze at Little Red Riding Hoods

Trials and Tribulations

[grandhotelabyss]

Any thoughts on Hesse?

Please hold that thought—I am going to read him very soon, within the month, Demian to be specific. I did read Siddhartha, or most of it, extracurricularly in ninth or tenth grade to impress a girl going through her teen Buddhist phase, but I don't remember much, except that it didn't inspire me to have a teen Buddhist phase (renounce desire? no thanks!). I want to read Hesse in general for one online-related parasocial reason: I've listened to the Art of Darkness podcast a lot this year, largely as a kind of moodboard for my novel-in-progress about a scandalous occultist writer, and I even went to their live event (they're semi-local) and met them, and those guys speak very highly of Hesse, and often. I have two IRL reasons for wanting to read Demian in particular among all his works: 1. it's the main novelistic inspiration for the controversial manga The Heart of Thomas, which I sometimes teach and am teaching again this semester; 2. I have a copy of it that was once owned and annotated by the renowned scholar Jack Zipes, a psychedelic paperback from 1968 with his name written on the inside cover.

(Our professor emeritus won't remember me, but I took his Transformations of the Fairy Tale course, the last class he taught at the University of Minnesota before he retired. Not only did we read classic and contemporary fairy tales, we also read Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy and Ismail Kadare's File on H. and watched a lot of interesting movies, from Svankmajer's Little Otik to Jordan's Company of Wolves to Freeway with Reese Witherspoon. I wrote a long final essay making some insanely over-the-top Marxist argument against Zipes's old friend Angela Carter—I fear I may have called her take on Bluebeard "imperialist" and attributed her baroque prose style to "neoliberalism" [what else?]—to which he generously responded in red pen that, while my paper was well-written, I should perhaps have taken Carter's irony more into account. Always good advice when some 25-year-old graduate student makes an insanely over-the-top Marxist argument against a work of imaginative literature! At the time, I'm sure, I would have dismissed irony as the all-too-common alibi of the capitalist running dog. I will be interested to see what Zipes wrote in Hesse's margins—he used a pencil, not a red pen, by the way, presumably because Hermann Hesse was not a graduate student.)

[joncronshawauthor]

The Gift of Fantasy: Ten Timeless Quotes on the Importance of Fantasy Literature

Fantasy literature has been captivating audiences for centuries, transporting readers to magical worlds and introducing them to unforgettable characters. It’s a genre that transcends time and appeals to people of all ages. Here you’ll find ten classic quotes that perfectly capture why fantasy literature is an important form of art and what makes it so special. Whether you’re a die-hard fan or…

[homonationalist]

Adorno alludes to both the responsibility of the artist and the recipient of artworks by insisting on the importance of the critical consciousness of the artist and recipient, who both must refuse external pressures to form matter according to accepted conventions or to use the fantastic to reinforce the status quo. This does not mean that all art must be nonconventional and that artists and recipients must think out of the box. Rather, Adorno urges that fantasy be free to explore how people and art are determined and to propose possible solutions to the problems in which we might be enmeshed. All art must become, willy nilly, objectivized as things compelled to take a place in what Adorno called the culture industry: "If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the world." All art, and thus all fantasy, has to become animate and has to animate: "Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. . . . Whatever in the artifact may be called the unity of its meaning is not static but processual, the enactment of antagonisms that each work necessarily has in itself.”

Jack Zipes from “Why Fantasy Matters Too Much” (2009)

[dipnotski]

Jack Zipes – Grimmlerin Mirası (2023)

On sekizinci yüzyılın sonlarında Almanya’da dünyaya gelen Grimm Kardeşler, Jacob ve Wilhelm, çeşitli Alman lehçelerindeki masalları köy köy, kasaba kasaba gezerek derlemiş ve Alman dilinin tüm inceliklerine hâkim olan iki dilbilimci olarak, bu dile büyük katkılarda bulunmuşlardı. Derledikleri masalları ‘Kinder-und Hausmarchen’ (Çocuk ve Ev Masalları) adı altında yayımlayan Grimmler, yetişkinleri…

[swordatsunset]

haha sickos voice yes

[ID: Indeed, all genuine artworks involve fantasy, the labor of the brain and/or imagination, and how to incorporate fantastic components into a work of art that negates what is externally expected of art in form and content. Every artwork must have some fantastic component, but not every artwork is artistic. In fact, much of what we call fantasy is predictable schlock and tritely conventional because it lacks critical reflection and self-reflection and appeals to market conditions and audience delusions. Those works are only significant because they reveal to what extent fantasy, the imagination, has become instrumentalized and how the fantastic is being used to impose views, as impositions (1) to profit from other people's needs and desires for spiritual regeneration and critical reflection; (2) to reconcile social, political, and aesthetic contradictions that are irreconcilable; and (3) to project images that can be readily consumed and only promote the replication of the same images. Fantasy artworks of all kinds have become depleted of cultural substance because fantasy matters too much. Fantasy has too much potential to subvert and explore the differential of freedom. It must be subdued, controlled, channeled, and sublimated so that it cannot serve to negate the spectacles that blind us to social forces that determine our lives. The culture industry realizes the potential of the fantastic by commodifying it: fantastic elements are produced and reproduced to become important ingredients in the constitution of constant spectacles that impede cognition of the operative principles of the social-economic system in which we live. Delusion has become the goal of fantasy, not illumination. Fantasy has become so common that it has become banal.

Nevertheless, there is a quality of hope and faith in serious fantasy literature and films that off-sets the mindless violence and banality and contrived exploitation that we encounter in the spectacles of everyday life. If fantasy can be subversive and resistant to existing social conditions, then it wants to undermine what passes for normality, to expose the contradictions of civil society, and to right the world out-of-joint in the name of humanity.

The fantastic is not only a projection of fantasy /imagination but also of rational critical consciousness. As Adorno remarked, there can be no separation of the intellect and the sensual when we talk about the fantastic, for fantasy negates what is corporeally experienced and sublimates what must be carried on as a necessary ingredient in the formation of a transformed condition with Utopian potential. Ernst Bloch, the great German philosopher of hope, and a good friend of Adorno, maintained that the best of artworks and even the worst often contained traces of anticipatory illumination that shed light on a way forward toward a Utopian society. Utopia cannot be defined, but it is constituted by fantastic elements in life and art that embody the daydreams of a better life, that is, a different life. A better life can only distinguish itself from what it negates in its differential freedom that is provided by the fantastic. It is through difference that the fantastic provides resistance and illuminates a way forward. It shows what is missing in our lives and refuses to compensate for the lack by proposing solutions and providing categories through which we can define people and situations. The fantastic offers glimpses and markers that recall the original meaning of fantasy, the capacity of the brain to show and make anything visible, for without penetrating the spectacle that blinds us, we are lost and lose the power to create our own social relations.]

[adarkrainbow]

I am currently re-reading Jack Zipes' "Fairytales and the art of subversion". Well I am re-reading this book's chapter on French fairytales, and I do plan on reading the rest of the work. And I have to say I might have been a bit too harsh about Zipes. I still wouldn't recommend him as a way to understand French literary fairytales - but at least now I understand why he is wrong, despite seemingly getting so many things right.

Because there ARE many right and true things in this book's second chapter. The summarized chronology of French literary fairytales ; the double inheritage of French folklore and Italian literature ; the enormous influence French literary fairytales had on the 18th and 19th century Germany... It's all there, correct and good.

But the main problem of Jack Zipes' interpretation and description of French fairytales remain. However I don't blame Zipes for it because this book was clearly written in the 80s United-States, for the 80s Americans, and as such yes there are things debunked now and yes Zipes evokes things that "nobody" does when in fact some people have done them before - just in Europe (like the whole segment in the first chapter about nobody caring about the social or historical analysis of fairytales). Similarly, the main flaw of this second chapter is very simply put a widespread misinformation, a common incorrect belief, but that is unfortunately still surviving to this day, and that is no surprising to see in 80s works - this misconception still is seen today, and its debunking is relatively "recent", at least recent enough to not be widespread.

And here's the problem: Jack Zipes writes his chapter and his analysis with one preconception and one thesis. Perrault (and others like mademoiselle L'Héritier or madame d'Aulnoy) wrote their fairytales for both adults and children, but with a strong focus on children ; if they added morals to their stories it was because these fairytales were moralistic education tools ; and the main goal and nature of these fairytales was a social and cultural endoctrinment to shape the "adults of tomorrow".

The idea that Perrault and others wrote exclusively or mainly for children was indeed widespread thanks to the 19th century mishandling of fairytales as a whole ; but this is false. And from this false basis that fairytales were mainly aimed at children, Zipes creates an analysis that could have worked... But is actually false, or very, very superficial - because to consider that Perrault and co.'s fairytales were aimed at children is a superficial reading of the stories with a strong lack of critical view or context-knowledge.

The real deal of the thing is this - yes, the "wave of fairytales" started out for adults and ended up for children, as Zipes himself explains. But Zipes (and all the others he based himself on) are wrong in believing the fairytales were aimed at children since the beginnings. Perrault, madame d'Aulnoy, mademoiselle L'Héritier and the others, did NOT write for children - they wrote for adults. And yes, Perrault evoked how his stories were "for children"... But he also wrote about how his stories had been written by his teenage son and not himself - but a careful look proves that Perrault's fairytales were only aimed at children as a "pretense", as a sort of stylistic ornament, as a literary "game" so to speak, the same way Perrault had to pretend the stories had not been written by him but collected by his youngest son - it was all part of the... "persona" if you will. It was only by the mid 18th century, with the renewal of the "literary French fairytale (non-orientalist)" that some authors started to think "Wait... Maybe we could use fairytales to teach children while entertaining them! Actually do pedagogic fairytales instead of just "playing pretend" at being literary moralists!". The most defining and prominent of those authors was madame Leprince de Beaumont, the first to ACTUALLY write literary fairytales for children, as in REALLY for children, not as in "Yeah, we say we write for children but clearly only adults will read it". One might argue Fénelon did wrote, at the end of the 17th century, pedagogic fairytales for the child he was supposed to teach (THE ROYAL HEIR!)... But unlike Perrault or d'Aulnoy's fairytales, which were public, Fénelon's story were private and only published after his death, in the 18th century.

As for how Perrault and d'Aulnoy's stories, written by adults for adults, ended up as "classics of childhood literature"... Well its simple: the Blue Library and the peddling books. The Blue Library, the most famous and renowned collection of cheap books sold to the uneducated masses by peddlers, did their money by taking great classics or massively popular works and printing out heavily edited or simplified versions of them - and the Blue Library immediately took all the most successful literary fairytales of the salons, and printed them out, and shared them massively across France for the non-aristocratic folks, and the uneducated folks, and the poor peasants... Which is how the stories became part of French popular culture, but which is also why the entire literary context and socio-cultural meaning of these tales was completely lost. How could the barely-alphabetized countryside family understand the refined puns, the courtly caricatures and the book references made in these stories (often very simplified, chaotically edited or misprinted?). People only remember pretty princesses and talking cats and fairy godmothers, and thus they classified it all back into "children stories" and, in a full circle, these literary stories invented out of the folklore became in turn folktales of the French countryside...

So yes, Jack Zipes' chapter on French fairytales is wrong, and spread misinformation, but it isn't his fault - he just did with what was widespread at the time, and he did his best as a foreigner dealing with works even misunderstood in their own country, AND his work is simply a bit outdated. Its not bad, it just... Didn't age well

[virgin-martyr]

Jack Zipes, The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang

[shortroundandeasytotrick]

Not NeverAfter reigniting my college hyperfixation.

I wrote a whole damn paper on Grimms tales and how we use them and change them for modern media, Jack Zipes' translation has damn near every story they wrote, no hold backs, and as little changing from their original (well GRIMM) version as possible.

DISCLAIMER

This is a rather direct translation of what the Grimms Brothers initially published, so all of the bigotry, racism, and general 1800s terribleness that was rampant at the time, is very much there and uncensored. Please do not pick up this book lightly.