Spring 2025-2026 Graduate Course

Dr. John A. Geck, ENGL 7360: Cinderella and the Didactics of Popular Culture

Mondays and Wednesdays 1230-1345

Image: Gustave Doré, “Cendrillon/Cinderella,” from Charles Perrault, Les Contes de Perrault (Paris, Librairie Firmin Didot Frères et Fils, 1862)

Cinderella and the Didactics of Popular Culture

Through a study of Cinderella narratives and related fairy- and folktales (The Constance Saga, Bluebeard, etc.), this course will move in two directions: inward through a configuration of related stories toward the heart of cultural aspirations, and outward through the cultural anxieties and tensions that manipulation of those stories attempts to redress. Our concern will be primarily with the didactic implication of action/adventure plots, paradigms of exile and return, the ideologies underlying the dynamics of oppression, pain fetishes, aspiration, and recovery, and religious and psychological quests for security through the balancing of sociological independence with the reinscription of cultural values. We will examine issues of childhood, adolescence, midolescence, and the aged as myth addresses the requirements of each. We will be particularly interested in historical perspectives as societies perpetually revise and revitalize their visions of themselves through the rewriting of their mythologies.