John Stenzel
English 180, Fall 2005

Journal Exercise 2--A Tale Retold and Transformed
E-mailed to your group leader by noon Thursday, October 20th, or earlier.

In this assignment I want you to grapple with three versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story--Perrault's ("Little Red Riding Hood"), the Grimms' ("Little Red Cap"), and James Thurber's ("The Girl and the Wolf")--and write an essay that shows your powers of observation and analysis, as well as your ability to write clearly and concretely.

The rhetorical situation is this: you are sitting in the Cafe Roma looking at our folktales along with the Thurber handout (with its illustration, of course), when a friend walks up to you and says, "Little Red Riding Hood? Why are you studying that?" Instead of throwing your hot mocha in your friend's face (thereby wasting your mocha), you realize this is your lucky day, because you can dazzle your friend with your response to this assignment. You explain how these three retellings of a folk tale take a certain number of basic ingredients and repackage them for different audiences, emphasizing some fundamental aspects of human nature while achieving very different effects. Besides answering two basic questions--what do the Perrault and Grimm versions have in common? In what important ways do they differ?--your essay analyzes the significance of the differences, AND it reckons with the Thurber version as well: how does Thurber exploit, update, undercut (or mock) the traditional story elements and the folk tale machinery? how does our study help us appreciate the many levels on which the Little Red Riding Hood story operates--entertaining readers, warning readers (about obedience? about sex? about gluttony?), even reflecting the sometimes conflicted values of the society they emerge from?

I strongly recommend that you proceed by re-reading the three versions, then gather your impressions of them in a freewriting mode before trying to organize your points of comparison and contrast. When you turn to write about Thurber, feel free to acknowledge that it is directed at adult readers (how do you know?) at the same time it subtly calls attention to the ways children have read the stories. Do not try to crank out this assignment at the last minute: I guarantee that investing some time for drafting and revision, with some time for reflection and re-organization, will prove fruitful and even pleasurable. I envision a successful response to deal with the two early works in two well-developed paragraphs, and then address Thurber and the other analysis in several more well-developed paragraphs. Hint: write your intro and conclusion last, not first.

Do not even think about consulting the huge amount of criticism and scholarship on such topics. I am interested in the ways you honestly wrestle with the basic texts, NOT in some scholar's view of "hidden meanings" or "political subtexts." Support your assertions with carefully selected concrete detail from within the three versions themselves--unsupported generalizations or flowery abstractions will not succeed.

Since we are all working only from the same three texts, you need not include a "works cited" section or footnotes. As before, pieces that are obviously first-and-final-drafts will not get full credit, nor will responses that are overly short, off-topic, or simply plot summaries. For ease and consistency's sake, send your submission in the body of an e-mail, as well as in an attachment (with your name in the filename); sometimes attachments get squirrelly, and we want to be able to READ and COMMENT ON your text, not admire your formatting. Be sure to print and save a hard copy as a backup--e-mail it to yourself as well, in case of inadvertent deletion.