teaching notes

Fairy Tales 2/23/05

Continued discussion of Jack Zipes’ essay on Disney. One student in particular was clearly upset that the article was “biased” against Disney, and pointed out repeatedly that Disney just intended to make a successful film—not to destroy fairy tales. Another student pointed out the passage where Zipes notes

Of course, it would be a great exaggeration to maintain that Disney’s spell totally divested the classical fairy tales of their meaning and invested them with his own. But it would not be an exaggeration to assert that Disney was a radical filmmaker who changed our way of viewing fairy tales, and that his revolutionary technical means capitalized on American innocence and utopianism to reinforce the social and political status quo. (333)

I also noted that, in the process of interpreting texts, the author’s intent is only one piece of information we may bring to bear in interpreting (along with social and historical context, responses of readers, effects of form—we’d begun by talking about shifts from written to filmed form). The discontented student said he wanted some facts instead of these opinions, wanted to know what Disney himself said about what he did. And I did note that what Disney said was he wanted to make a successful film, and that motives are often mixed (e.g., the Grimms wanted to preserve German folk culture, to win the approval of literary critics, and to make money). I also asked the class how it might change their interpretation of the tale to know either that Disney wanted to make money, or wanted to make art, or wanted to promote his views of the world, and another student said it wouldn’t really change her view, because the movie (we’d just seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) was what it was. And another said writers always want to present their view of the world. But I fear the discontented student remains unhappy-- probably convinced I am biased. If I don’t come up with another way to address this sort of thing, I may simply have to stop teaching this course.

Science Fiction 2/25/05

We discussed Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll,” but didn’t get to “They”; two stories per class may be too much. (On the other hand, I did spend some time at the beginning discussing magazine publishing of stories in the 40s&c, so if the Lem report last time had been shorter, we’d have had more time today.)

But I must find better ways to elicit analysis of this. The story drives me crazy, frankly. I loathe Heinlein, have done ever since I got to the part in Stranger in a Strange Land where we’re told (authoritatively) that women really want to be raped, and I threw the book away. But he’s the “Dean of SF” and all that, so it seems wrong not to include him.

But “The Roads Must Roll” is anti-union: the technicians grievances are presented as completely unjustified, and the narrative events have more weight that the sop to labor in the references to a previous, justified strike. It’s anti-leftist—the story’s “Functionalism” is an anticommunist portrait of something supposed to be like Marxism. Unlike “functionalism,” neither socialism nor Marxism actually argues against the value of human equality (more the contrary--and indeed the story's references to the "little people" seem to suggest that the vision of "TRMR" is not really endorsing a belief in equality--paradoxically enough, perhaps, it rather confirms the leftist critique that bourgeois democracy is not truly democratic). The idea of the power of the essential workers is perhaps modeled on the communist notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"--which Marx suggested as an intermediate stage before the withering away of the state (and which Lenin & Stalin took up as part of their rhetoric for the USSR). Like the Lenin/Stalin models, though, Van Kleeck's plan seems to be more a vision of individual power (& VK’s neurotic compensation) than of actual collective control. And the story glorifies the strong silent brilliant kingly manly technocrat who has to leave the little woman at home to attend to his important job. Blech. Anyway, I wanted to get them to see this as problematic, but I couldn’t make it happen without just putting it out there, which I was reluctant to do. Feh. Meanwhile “They” is a solipsistic fantasy of being the center of the universe. Blech.