Sunje Redies

Bio: Sunje Redies is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Fictional universe & Narrative. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 4 citations.

Return with New Complexities: Robert Coover's Briar Rose

Abstract: Postmodernist fiction usually addresses certain semiotic concerns about the relationship between language and things, between word and world. Its literary techniques cast doubt on what we tend to call "real": the world in its social-if not material-manifestation, the subject as an entity, historical "facts" and "grand narratives" as global, totalizing explanations for society and the human condition. The world is experienced and conveyed through language, and the charges against those "truths" range from seeing them as tainted by the medium to assuming they are entirely created by it. The world itself is radically called into question, and the status of reality and our place in it are unclear. Postmodernism creates ontological uncertainties where modernism posed mainly epistemological ones (McHale 6-11). Art has not been considered to be a reliable mirror of reality since the onset of modernism in art about a hundred years ago. By now it is not even believed to provide a source of meaning or order in the face of general chaos. The resulting literary practice involves techniques that reveal both the processes through which fiction produces meaning and the artificial status of fictional constructs. This can be achieved through implicit or explicit reflection on construction and product: metafiction. Also, traditional forms of narrative logic are broken and a radical destabilization of the fictional world and its principles results. One way of contemplating the fictional construction of meaning is conscious intertextuality. The idea of the author as original creator has long been challenged, and a number of theories regard all texts as intertextual, as they may all just be networks of quotations and incorporations of existing texts.1 Postmodern texts, however, often directly address this problem by referring, in one way or another, to specific texts or genres. The results have been called parodies by Linda Hutcheon (22), pastiches by Fredric Jameson (72), or palimpsests by Gerard Genette (532). In order to understand them, the reader needs to have internalized a set of rules and conventions of the parodied works or genres, that is, possess a specific competence (which may well be unconscious). Only then can readers understand and judge a particular performance.2 One of the genres used by postmodernist writers is the classical fairy tale, and their stories demand to be read in relation to fairy-tale traditions. Judgments about these stories use our competence, which determines our expectations of them. These expectations are indirectly or directly addressed, and we are therefore forced to question our understanding of those tales. In using formula fiction to create pastiche, palimpsest, or parody, artists expose the mechanisms that make up our competence in understanding them. Formulaic fiction-and fairy tales can be counted as an example of this-emphasizes the logic and dynamic of certain forms of plot and is rule-driven. Postmodernist writers use it parodically to show how worlds are constructed through narrative. The stylized characteristics of a genre, consciously, that is, metafictionally, applied, present stories as organized art, as games with certain rules. Briar Rose "Dornroschen" is one of the best-known tales from the Grimms' collection, but like most of them has predecessors in other European countries. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile collected fifty stories in his Pentamerone, which originate from the oral tradition but were written down in baroque style. His "Sun, Moon, and Talia" resembles the later "Dornroschen." The French writer Charles Perrault closed his 1697 collection of tales with "La belle au bois dormant." But even much earlier, the basic elements of the Aarne-Thompson type 410 tale can be found in an episode of the fourteenth-century French Arthurian story Perceforest (Thompson 97). In the famous and still the most widely known version by the brothers Grimm (adapted by Disney for their animated film), the royal couple celebrates the birth of their long-wanted child. …

Figuring 'Sleeping Beauty' : metamorphosis of a literary and cultural trope in European fairy tales and medicine, c. 1350-1700

Abstract: This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to a recurrent cultural trope: the figure of the sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauties are young women—paradigms of femininity, paragons of virtue and physical perfection—who lose consciousness and become comatose and catatonic, for prolonged periods. In this unnatural state, these female bodies remain intact: materially incorrupt, aesthetically unblemished. Thus can the body of the sleeping beauty be defined as an enigma and a paradox: a nexus of competing and unanswered questions, uniquely worthy of investigation. This thesis examines the metamorphoses of the figure of the sleeping beauty in literature and medicine between c.1350 and 1700 in order to interrogate the enduring aesthetic and epistemological fascination that she exercises in different contexts: her potency to entrance, her capacity to charm, in both literary and philosophical realms. The widespread presence of the sleeping beauty in literature and art, as well as in the broader social sphere, over the centuries, indicates the figure’s important and ongoing cultural role. Central to this role is the figure’s dual nature and functionality. On the one hand, conceptualized as allegories, sleeping beauties act as receptacles for a complex matrix of patriarchal fears, desires and beliefs about the female body in general, and the virgin and maternal bodies in particular. On the other hand, understood as material or bodily entities, sleeping beauties make these same ideological questions incarnate. Sleeping beauties are, therefore, signs, treated as material bodies, a tension which this thesis explores. As such, they are prime subjects for cross-disciplinary correlational study and historicist analysis: vehicles for comparison and dialogue between literature, medicine, and religion on the issues of power and passivity, sexuality and gender difference, mortality and beauty, nature and the unnatural or supernatural. Sleeping beauties negotiate the boundaries of human desire for, and capacity for belief in, miracles and wonders.

Wondrous transformations: rereading and rewriting wonder in contemporary anglophone and francophone fairy tales

Abstract: This thesis compares contemporary anglophone and francophone rewritings of traditional fairy tales for adults. Examining material dating from the 1990s to the present, including novels, novellas, short stories, comics, televisual and filmic adaptations, this thesis argues that while the revisions studied share similar themes and have comparable aims, the methods for inducing wonder (where wonder is defined as the effect produced by the text rather than simply its magical contents) are diametrically opposed, and it is this opposition that characterises the difference between the two types of rewriting. While they all engage with the hybridity of the fairy-tale genre, the anglophone works studied tend to question traditional narratives by keeping the fantasy setting, while francophone works debunk the tales not only in relation to questions of content, but also aesthetics. Through theoretical, historical, and cultural contextualisation, along with close readings of the texts, this thesis aims to demonstrate the existence of this francophone/anglophone divide and to explain how and why the authors in each tradition tend to adopt such different views while rewriting similar material. This division is the guiding thread of the thesis and also functions as a springboard to explore other concepts such as genre hybridity, reader-response, and feminism. The thesis is divided into two parts; the first three chapters work as an in-depth literature review: after examining, in chapters one and two, the historical and contemporary cultural field in which these works were created, chapter three examines theories of fantasy and genre hybridity. The second part of the thesis consists of textual studies and comparisons between francophone and anglophone material and is built on three different approaches. The first (chapter four) looks at selected texts in relation to questions of form, studying the process of world building and world creation enacted when authors combine and rewrite several fairy tales in a single narrative world. The second (chapter five) is a thematic approach which investigates the interactions between femininity, the monstrous, and the wondrous in contemporary tales of animal brides. Finally, chapter six compares rewritings of the tale of ‘Bluebeard’ with a comparison hinged on the representation of the forbidden room and its contents: Bluebeard’s cabinet of wonder is one that he holds sacred, one where he sublimates his wives’ corpses, and it is the catalyst of wonder, terror, and awe. The three contextual chapters and the three text-based studies work towards tracing the tangible existence of the division postulated between francophone and anglophone texts, but also the similarities that exist between the two cultural fields and their roles in the renewal of the fairy-tale genre.

Who's Wicked Now?: The Stepmother as Fairy-Tale Heroine

Abstract: The wicked stepmother is a staple of the popular fairy-tale tradition and arguably its most famous villain. While she wasn't always wicked or always a stepmother in folklore tradition, the wicked stepmother can be found in a variety of well-known Western fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm feature some of the best-known stepmothers, such as those in "Cinderella" (ATU 510A), "Snow White" (ATU 709), and "Hansel and Gretel" (ATU 327A) as well as lesserknown stepmothers, such as those in "The Six Swans" (ATU 450) and "The Juniper Tree" (ATU 720), all of whom are wicked. Walt Disney took the Grimms' wicked stepmother and gave her an unforgettable face in his 1937 film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Snow White's stepmother stands out for her terrifying image as the wicked queen. Since then, the wicked stepmother has become a stock figure, a fairy-tale type that invokes a vivid image at the mention of her role - so much so that stepmothers in general have had to fight against their fairy-tale reflections. A quick Internet search for the term "wicked stepmother" will produce hundreds of websites dedicated to the plight of stepmothers fighting against the "wicked" moniker they have inherited from fairy tales. Robert Coover's 2004 novel, Stepmother, takes on the wicked stepmother figure of fairy-tale tradition and offers a more complex depiction of the character. The plot of Coover's novel is quite simple; the novel, however, is far from simple. Stepmother, the title character and the novel's protagonist, is trying to save her daughter's life. Her unnamed daughter has been found guilty of an unnamed crime against the court of Reaper's Woods and is to be executed. Stepmother breaks her daughter out of prison, and the two of them flee to the woods. Stepmother hides her daughter and, once the daughter is recaptured, tries various schemes to prevent, or at least to delay, the planned execution. She tries appealing to the Reaper, her arch enemy and the authority in the woods, with magic, sex, and reason, but she fails. Her daughter is executed, and Stepmother seeks vengeance. The execution of her daughter and Stepmother's subsequent revenge is not a new plot to Stepmother, as she repeats it over and again with each of her daughters, the many heroines of fairy-tale tradition: How many I've seen go this way, daughters, stepdaughters, whatever - some just turn up at my door, I'm never quite sure whose they are or where they come from - but I know where they go: to be drowned, hung, stoned, beheaded, burned at the stake, impaled, torn apart, shot, put to the sword, boiled in oil, dragged down the street in barrels studded on the inside with nails or nailed into barrels with holes drilled in them and rolled into the river. Their going always sickens me and the deep self-righteous laughter of their executioners causes the bile to rise, and for a time thereafter I unleash a storm of hell, or at least what's in my meager power to raise, and so do my beautiful wild daughters, it's a kind of violent mourning, and so they come down on us again and more daughters are caught up in what the Reaper calls the noble toils of justice and thus we keep the cycle going, rolling along through this timeless time like those tumbling nail-studded barrels. (1-2) Stepmother explains that there is nothing new in what we are about to read; she has experienced it all before and will experience it all again. But she still has to try to save her daughter, and as readers we are left with the impression that she will keep trying with each new daughter's appearance. The impetus of the novel is summed up in its second sentence, narrated by Stepmother: "my poor desperate daughter, her head is locked on one thing and one thing only: how to escape her inescapable fate" (1). Throughout the novel, Stepmother and other characters struggle against their predetermined fairy-tale functions. Despite recognizing the "inescapability" of their fates, they still try to change the cycle of events they know will unfold by manipulating fairy-tale patterns to their advantage. …

Re-conceptualizing gender through narrative play in fairy-tale retellings

Abstract: This dissertation contributes to scholarship on contemporary fairy-tale retellings by exploring how gender is conceptualized, or not, as an unstable construct through specific narrative strategies. The texts I analyze are primarily American literary fiction and films, aimed at adults and young adults, from the past twenty years. I argue that narrative strategies affect the way gender is conceptualized in retellings even if they do not directly engage with gender concepts on the level of story. I suggest that gender conceptualization and narrative structures can work in concert, in opposition, or by revealing alternate possibilities, and I focus on the complexity with which retellings reenvision traditional fairy tales—paying particular attention to plot, narration, and metafiction. My purpose is to show how gender ideologies and narrative structures interact, and I conclude that the more disruptive the narrative strategies are to fairy-tale patterns, the more enabled the retelling is to question gender as a concept. Contemporary retellings engage their intertexts in intricate and complex ways that reflect contemporary theoretical work with gender by theorists such as Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam, and the resulting degeneration of fairy-tale narrative patterns opens up fairy-tale fragments to be signified in new and multifaceted ways. In each chapter I engage in both narratological and interpretative analysis in order to demonstrate the varied relationships between discursive structuring and story in fairytale retellings. I show how disruptive and destabilizing narrative strategies can reinforce thematic arguments about the construction of the wicked witch character in Robert Coover’s Stepmother, Garth Nix’s “An Unwelcome Guest,” and Catherynne M. iv Valente’s “A Delicate Architecture.” I explore how reliance on plots from source tales undercuts thematic representations of gendered identity in three films, Ever After, Sydney White, and Aquamarine. I demonstrate how destabilizing narrative strategies, most notably lack of narrative closure, enable conceptualizations of gender not present in the source tales in Kelly Link’s “Swans,” “Magic for Beginners,” and “The Cinderella Game.” I analyze how Iserian narrative gaps and blanks produce a space for conceptualizing alternative gender configurations not present in the story in Robert Coover’s Briar Rose and Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose.