Popular Culture and Narrative: Use and Abuse of the Fairy Tale
This MIT OpenCourseWare course examines where fairy tales come from and how they are built, tracing the techniques of oral storytelling that shaped them before they were ever written down. Lessons look at narrative structure, the folklorists who first catalogued tale types and motifs, and the way print, film, and other media have reworked inherited stories for new audiences. Readings draw on classic collections such as the Brothers Grimm alongside scholarly work on structuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to the form. The course materials include a syllabus, lecture topics, and assignments asking students to analyze specific tales and their adaptations. Taught within MIT's Comparative Media Studies/Writing program, it treats fairy tales as a case study in how popular narrative forms travel, mutate, and get put to different cultural uses over time.