Retelling the Fairy Tale Assignment
Overview: A growing number of young adult authors are using fairy tales as seeds for their stories. Some of these retellings remain faithful to their original source material, while others present clever adaptations. Still others take the form of mash-ups, or creative combinations of multiple tales. Educators call these fractured fairy tales where the story of a traditional fairy tale is rearranged to create new plots with fundamentally different meanings or messages.
To do this, writers rearrange the fairy tale for an updated audience’s social and moral ways. In other words, what 1800’s Germany thought was acceptable may not be acceptable in 1920’s Florida. These updated tales reflect the values and ideals of a new society, while keeping recognizable story lines.
Task. For this assignment, you are going to delve deeper into your fairy tale of choice and its culture/author(s). Using your interpretation, you are going to create detailed annotations for your text to show how the close reading helps you to retell your fairy tale. Then, you will create a new adaptation for the fairy tale of your choice in a modern culture. In order to do this, we need to start thinking about retelling, we first have to know the original culture that the story comes from and the interpretations of the story that we know
Assignment Details and Requirements:
You will be rewriting your fairy tale for a modern audience (readership).
Research 21st century culture.
You will be using our present-day culture. You do NOT have to set the story in America though.
You may and are encouraged to explore what these fairy tales would be like in a world dealing with a horrible virus.
For the Content of your Story
You may change the perspective of the story, giving readers a new point of view. I.e. The stepmother in “Little Snow White”.
Your fairy tale’s setting must be recognizable for today’s world even if you decide to set the setting in a “far away land.”
Write a 500- word Critical introduction explaining how the annotations help you support that interpretation from your Close reading, and how this helps you to retell the fairy tale for a new audience.
You will have a Work Cited Page to go along with the Critical Introduction and your annotations.
You will be creating a series of annotations (at least 8 footnotes/endnotes on the Word Document).
Your annotations will present information (facts, definitions, images, maps, links, maybe clips depending on your project) you’ve collected across your research process that helps shape your interpretation of this text.
Your annotations will present information to help support your analysis that you present in your Critical introduction, which will help you rewrite the fairy tale.
