Read widely...

Today (9/9) in class Dr. Sexson kept returning to the premise that we must read widely and deeply to be able to fully appreciate the Children's lit, and indeed any literature, that we read. Also, as Haas and other essayists are telling us in the collections of Fairy Tales we are reading, there are NO ORIGINALS! There are earlier and later versions which have been added to and subtracted from. These topics reminded me of one of my favorite literary theorists, Northrop Frye. In his short book The Educated Imagination in the chapter entitled "The Keys to Dreamland"(a phrase borrowed from a book we will be reading this semester), Frye writes, "You don't relate [imagination in literature] directly to life or reality: you relate works of literature, as we've said earlier, to each other. Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we've built, and keep adding wings to all the time" (Frye 95). As Dr. Sexson has pointed out, we cannot understand or recognize the 'signatures' within literature without knowing the archetypes. As I've been reading through the Great Fairy Tale Tradition I have noticed that, within motifs, some of the stories are almost identical except for two or three small differences. Those small differences are what can make Straparola's version of a Cinderella story more personal for you than Basile's version. All literature is built on something and all new literature is built on that. So then, are there EVER really originals????