The Little Mermaid
"But I must be paid also," said the witch, "and it is not a trifle that I ask. You have the sweetest voice of any who dwell here in the depths of the sea, and you believe that you will be able to charm the prince with it also, but this voice you must give to me; the best thing you possess will I have for the price of my draught. My own blood must be mixed with it, that it may be as sharp as a two-edged sword."
"But if you take away my voice," said the little mermaid, "what is left for me?" "Your beautiful form, your graceful walk, and your expressive eyes; surely with these you can enchain a man's heart. Well, have you lost your courage? Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment; then you shall have the powerful draught." "It shall be," said the little mermaid. (Andersen 50)
The passage quoted above is an important excerpt from "The Little Mermaid," a famous work by the great Danish storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen. This excerpt marks the turning point of the story, when the little mermaid adamantly resolves to trade her voice for a pair of legs with the sea-witch, a decision that adversely changes her fate. From here onwards, the story of a mermaid who longs to be human and with the prince she loves heads towards a tragic end: she will transform into wind eventually, bereft of love and overcome by grief. This is no doubt a poignant story about unrequited love; however what makes it striking is also its primary and perhaps conflicting role as a fairytale. In fact, "The Little Mermaid" was one of the stories from Andersen's third volume of fairytales for children: "Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Tredie Hefte" published in 1837. In the passage itself, the two mai...
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...ans. Neil Philip. New York: Viking, 1998.
Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holoquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holoquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
Dentith, Smith. Parody. London: Routledge, 2000.
Hutcheon, Linda. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1995.
Montgomery, Martin, et al. Ways of Reading: Advanced reading skills for students of English literature. 2ndedition. London: Routledge, 1992.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.
Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Weber, Jean Jacques,ed. The Stylistic Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the Present. London: Arnold, 1996.
Wilson, Deirdre and Sperber, Dan. "On Verbal Irony". Weber 260-268.
One example of the “Social Learning Theory” is the Bobo doll experiment conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961. In this experiment children were either exposed to an adult exhibiting aggressive behavior or non-aggressive behavior towards the doll. When it came time for the children to interact with the doll, the children who were exposed to aggressive behavior were more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior (Nolen, n.d.).
Fort, Keith. “The Function of Style in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’.” Sewanee Review 72 (1964): 643-51. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard and Paula Kepos. Vol. 29. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988. 198-200.
Reading is on the decline and our reading skills are declining right along with the amount of reading we do. This is happening right across the board through both genders, all age groups and education levels, people are busy and they just do not have time to read books that they are not required to read for school or work. There are serious consequences to this neglect of reading that will continue to worsen if ignored. We need to take notice of what is happening to our culture and stop this situation from continuing, we must act to correct these issues that we are faced with. These things are discussed in the essay “Staying Awake’’ by Ursula K. Le Guin who uses the NEA essays “To Read or Not to Read’’ and “Reading at Risk’’ to support her argument that there is a decline in the amount of time that we are spending on reading and our ability to understand what it is that we are reading.
...n” is a great example of an old myth or tale reconstructed and adapted for a modern audience in a new medium. It is a progression on one hand in its use of modern language, setting, and style but it is also the product of the old myths in that it is essentially the same on the thematic level. In addition, the level of self-awareness on the part of the narrator and, by extension, the author marks it out as an illustration of the very notion of evolutionary changes of myths and fairy tales. Adaptation is the solution to the fairy tale, and fairy tales have been endlessly changing themselves throughout history and, by some strange transforming or enchanting power endlessly staying the same.”
Under the sea, in an idyllic and beautiful garden, stands a statue of a young man cut out of cold stone – for the Little Mermaid who knows nothing but the sea, the statue stands as an emblem of the mysterious over-world, a stimulus for imagination and sexual desire, an incentive for expansion of experience, and most predominately, an indication that something great and all-encompassing is missing from her existence. Traces of curiosity and a vague indication of the complexities of adult desires mark the child mermaid; in such a stage of development, the statue will suffice. However, as the Little Mermaid reaches puberty, the statue must allegorically come alive in order to parallel the manifestation of her new-found adult desires – the statue must become a prince in his world of adulthood above the sea. Thus, powered by an insistent and ambiguous longing for self-completion, the Little Mermaid embarks on a journey of self-discovery, and, to her ultimate misfortune, prematurely abandons her child-like self as sexual lust and the lust for an adult life takes hold of her.
Lyons, Oliver, and Bill Bonnie. "An Interview with Tobias Wolff." Contemporary Literature. 31.1 (1990): 1-16. Web. 12 Feb. 2012.
A fairytale is a fictional fantasy fable that passes through generations of children as source of interest to them. Though used for the intent of entertainment, fairytales often indirectly advocate a moral or message to readers (whom are usually children), in hopes that they will grow up to apply these ethics and lead a righteous life. This criteria, however, often originates from the occurrence of a magical transformation; it is this paranormality that introduces the characters of the story to a side of life far from what they have grown to know and learn to adapt to the dramatic amend in their life. This is evident in the characters in world-renowned tales such as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.
Every individual with lupus has distinctive side effects that can run from gentle to extreme and may go back and forth over the long haul. New symptoms may keep on manifesting years after the initial detection, and distinctive indications can happen at diverse times. In some individuals with lupus the skin or joints are influenced. Other individuals experience indications in numerous parts of their body. Exactly how fully a person’s body is influenced by Lupus changes from individual to individual. (Encyclopedia.com, 2014)
Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain. An Introduction to Literature. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006
Behaviorists didn’t always believe in this idea. In fact, before 1961 scientific behavioral studies only revolved around the ideas of conditioning and association and reward and punishment. Albert Bandura pioneered the study of social learning when he observed that people also acquired behaviors through observation and imitation.
Rohrick, Lutz. Introduction. Fairytales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm. Ed. R.B. Bottingheimer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. 1-9.
As the poem begins, Sexton starts with how the Prince and Cinderella are living happily ever after, but compromising the original naïve direction, she gives the poem a modern context bringing the reader back to reality. While it is obvious to the audience the discrepancies in Sexton’s version, it brings out many jealousies many of us struggle with, such as wealth and everlasting happiness. Sexton makes her audience notice early on many of the pre-conceived notions and expectations we bring to fairy tales. Sexton knows that real life gives no reason to be perceived as happiness, because why learn something that will never amount to use in reality? This tale is Sexton’s answer to her audiences of the “happ...
Vladimir Propp played an integral part in the analysis of the structure that fairy tales typically follow. Born in Russia in 1895, Propp was dedicated to studying folklore and fairy tales (“Propp, Vladimir Iakovlevich”). He studied many folklore and fairy tale stories to break them into individual sections. These individual sections defined what Propp called a “function” of the story that references a common plot device or archetypal character. In 1928, he published a book titled Morphology of the Folktale, written in Russian. It would be another 30 years until the book was finally translated into
In Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment, performed in the 1960’s by Dr. Albert Bandura, showed the children a video of an adult hitting, punching, kicking and, moreover general aggression towards the doll. While another group of children viewed an adult, being gentle with the Bobo doll and a control group in which there was no influence towards the doll. Because Dr. Bandura used isolated groups and used unique methods with each group, his research, classified as an experiment as he was manipulating a factor, which was the type of attitude shown to the Bobo doll that the children watched (Myers, 2014). In the begging of the study, there were 72 children, 36 boys and 36 girls, observed at the Stanford University and tested for aggressive behavior
Propp, V. (2004) Morphology of the Folk-tale. In: Rivkin, J. and Ryan, M. (2nd ed.) Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 72-76.