Youth, as a stage of life, has been put front and center in literary fairy tales, often more so than the stages of midlife and older age. This course is an overview of what has been lost, forgotten and deliberately erased from canonical collections such as The Brothers Grimm. Over the five sessions, we will do an in-depth study of two stories, one a Grimms’ tale and another from the folkloric record, that showcase their difference from youth tales. We will explore archetypes and motifs of role reversals, inversions of fortune, acquisition of wisdom and the effectiveness of collective action in stories about the second half of life.
The class also serves as an introduction to Jungian Arts-Based Research (JABR) methodology and students are encouraged to incorporate this approach into their own creative practices. JABR is relatively new and has been written about by academics and taught by Jungian art therapists. Building upon the concept of trans-disciplinarity in physics, it applies Jung’s work on the transcendent function to offer creatives a way to examine subjectivity and multiple meaning making without hierarchies. It is not a form of art therapy but can be therapeutic in the creative process.