We will be returning to the air very soon!

You may know that we also do a blog/radio show called Punkonomics (punkonomics.org).

Secrets of the Fairies will now become a segment that will air with punonomics that is returning to the airwaves on WPRK91.5FM (Rollins College radio) every Wednesday 2-4PM — starting today!

We will definitely tell you when there will be special Secrets of the Fairies segment. Not today because Charlotte and Thalia are in North Carolina where Charlotte is presenting our most recent co-authored paper (I’m Beni BTW):

Here’s the abstract and info:

North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature (NASSCFL) Annual Conference

(Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014)

Cypherpunks in the Chambre Bleue:

A 21st Century Gamified Pedagogy to Teach the Social Networks of the 17th Century at the Intersection of Intellectual Culture and Political-Economics

by Charlotte Trinquet and Benjamin Balak

The goal of this paper is to apply avant-garde pedagogy to develop an interdisciplinary course on the 17th century salon tradition in its political-economic context. We base our work on over a decade of experience teaching French culture and economic history with role-playing and strategic games, as well as using technology to reify and contextualize the zeitgeist of past eras for students who grow up in a radically de-historicised culture.

The 17th century is particularly hard to teach because most of the drastic social changes over this formative era involved changes to social networks–between classes, geographical locations, and institutions. Furthermore, the experiences of the major geographical areas and political powers were very diverse and led to significant redistribution of power most notably from France to England. The processes leading to these changes are multiple, complex, and thoroughly multi- and inter-disciplinary and a source of continuing argument among historians.

As Mark Twain said: “History never repeats itself but it often rhymes,” and context is especially hard to establish since we are ourselves still living at the end of the modern era. We propose that there is a tremendous opportunity to learn from the consilience of inductions between the dawn of modernity and its end, and we attempt to harness the current technologically-mediated social networks to our pedagogical advantage. Specifically, we will present a gamified classroom environment based on collaborative quest-based learning and assessment, intended to foreground the similarities between the early-modern literary salons, and our own post-modern social networks.

Party at Versailles (Second Life)

Rollins College PR about Charlotte and the show!

http://360.rollins.edu/academics-and-research/beyond-happily-ever-after

Beyond Happily Ever After

August 30, 2013 – by Jeffrey Billman

A show on WPRK examines fairy tales as social critiques.

“It [was] really almost by accident,” Charlotte Trinquet says. She speaks quickly, as if there’s a volcano of information on the tip of her tongue just waiting to erupt, her thick French accent shaping every nuance and syllable. Trinquet is an adjunct professor at the Hamilton Holt School, and right now she’s talking about how she discovered her favorite subject: fairy tales.

It was in a master’s course on 17th-century fiction, and her professor assigned the works of the famous French fairy-tale writer Charles Perrault. “My first impression was, like, ‘Oh my God, we can actually read fairy tales in [a master’s] class?’ ” she says. “For us, it’s like underdog literature; you don’t even read it in class. You read the fables, not the fairy tales. That’s something parents are supposed to read [to children] at night.”

That was the spark that lit a fuse. Her PhD, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, focused on these 17th-century French fairy tales and their relationship to Italian fairy tales from the earlier 17th and 16th centuries. Last semester, she taught a course at Holt called Women’s Power in Fairy Tales, which plumbed these famous stories’ origins for insights into the evolution of proto-feminism. And now, every Wednesday morning at 9, she co-hosts a show on WPRK called Secrets of the Fairies.

(Photos by Scott Cook)

Trinquet has been studying fairy tales—from Little Red Riding Hood to Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella to Puss in Boots, all of which, incidentally, were passed down from Perrault—for two decades now. What she learned was that French fairy tale writers—specifically, French women in the court of King Louis XVI who recited and popularized many of these tales—did not borrow their stories from the peasants of the late 17th century, as originally suspected, but rather from Italians—specifically, Italian elites, especially Giovanni Straparola and Giambattista Basile. Both were writing for their privileged peers.

As the target audiences changed, so too did the stories. In the court of Louis XVI, for instance, they were subtly, subversively proto-feminist. Later, they took on a more Christian bent, informing bourgeois children that God was looking out for them. Other versions picked up the patriarchal norms of the day.

“Then, you really have to come to the Brothers Grimm,” she says. “The Grimms didn’t originally write for children; they first intended to show that Germany could be reunited through lore and language.” So their first edition, in 1812, was gory and graphic, targeted toward adults. In time, the younger brother began revisiting these fairy tales, rewriting them for children in an 1856 collection, which is the one passed on over subsequent generations—and eventually to Disney, which has solidified them in Western consciousness.

But in their original telling and context, Trinquet says, “Fairy tales are social critiques. Until the 19th century, [they were] really subversive.”

Take, for instance, an early version of Cinderella, written by a woman. In its first incarnation, it was a story of restoration, and Cinderella was the daughter of a king who had lost his kingdom through misdeeds. This original Cinderella did go to a ball and lose her shoe, but she had not yet met the prince. Instead, the prince finds and falls in love with her shoe, so in love that it makes him physically ill; his mother begins bringing women to the castle to try on the shoe. Finally Cinderella shows up and tries it on. When it fits, the women of the castle beg her to marry the prince. She refuses—at least until after she can tell her own story and her parents’ estate is given back.

This story served as an assertion of a woman’s rights. In the modern version, Cinderella becomes passive and polite, dependent on a prince’s beneficence to improve her lowly station in life.

It was stories like this—conversations in which Trinquet unwound these ancient tales and discussed their significance in relation to cultural changes—that led her to take on the radio show. Trinquet and her husband, Beni Balak, an economics professor at Rollins, were chatting with Jesse Velez ’13, who co-hosts Balak’s WPRK show Punkonomics. It was Velez who first suggested her show, and later called to tell Trinquet he’d booked her a time slot. Trinquet accepted it as a challenge, and then took a liking to it. She’s brought her husband and two children on the show to chat about these stories, and engages with listeners both through phone calls and online comments.

The show provides a platform for Trinquet to discuss little-known aspects of fairy tales, which often have to do with sexuality—how the wolf’s threat to eat Little Red Riding Hood meant rape, or how the original Sleeping Beauty was essentially a victim of sexual abuse.

“The original fairy tales,” she says, “are so much more interesting. If it’s not in context, you don’t get it.”

Are you 50+ in Central Florida and want to take a short fun liberal-arts course with Charlotte at Rollins College?

NOTES:

(1) There should be some scholarships coming up (starting tomorrow: August 1st). It’s not very expensive anyway (see info below)

(2) Dr Charlotte Trinquet’s course:

Reading Fairytales to Grand-Daughters: Beyond Disney’s Cultural Establishment
	Instructor:	Charlotte Trinquet, Ph.D.
	Description:	This 4 week course is designed for students to get an understanding of the rich variety of classic fairy tales, to go back in time and see where they come from, and to see if there is a tradition which is better adapted to the modern aspirations of young children.
	Dates & Location:	Wednesdays, September 4, 11, 18 and 25 from 10:30am-noon Hamilton Holt School Auditorium
	Contact:	Register for this course.

My husband Dr Beni Balak’s (from Punkonomics.org, Mondays 4-5pm on WPRK91.5FM) course:

Economics, Media, and Propaganda
	Instructor:	Benjamin Balak, Ph.D.
	Description:	This course examines how economic rhetoric in the media is shaping popular understanding of political-economic issues and public policy. There is a gap between professional economics and the public discourse about economics. This is particularly apparent in political public rhetoric and thus has a significant effect on decisions taken, policies enacted, and the democratic process in general. This course will attempt to disentangle the actual social-science from the ideologies and interest groups that dominate the media. In the words of one of the greatest economists of the 20th century Joan Robinson (1955): “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”
	Dates & Location:	Thursdays, October 3, 10, 17 and 24 from 1pm-2:30pm Hamilton Holt School Auditorium
	Contact:	Register for this course

Info from http://www.rollins.edu/rcll/senior/ :

Senior TARS (STARS) Program

The Senior TARS (STARS) Program at Rollins College offers innovative liberal arts programming and other educational activities for adults 50 and older from Winter Park, Maitland, Eatonville, and surrounding communities.

Sponsored in part from a grant from the Winter Park Health Foundation, the STARS Program consists of courses on educational topics with particular appeal to older adults.  The STARS Program provides an affordable fee structure, small class size, accessible facility, convenient parking, daytime and evening offerings, and opportunities for active learning and socialization with other older adult students. The Hamilton Holt School with its rich history of educating nontraditional students at Rollins College was the logical home for the STARS Program.

Today’s older adult learner is an active and vibrant part of our community and deserves the best educational opportunities available. Rollins College is gratified to be able to welcome an entirely new cohort of students to the Rollins liberal arts experience.

With no entrance requirements, no tests and no grades, nothing could be more appealing. In fact, no college background is needed at all.

Participate in stimulating classes designed to spark your smarts so you can become the smartest kid on the block again.

A STAR membership with the Rollins Center for Lifelong Learning gives you access to enlightening and entertaining non-credit courses taught by Rollins professors.  Members will be eligible to enroll in three non-credit courses per semester.

Annual membership: $200 (includes 3 classes in the fall and 3 classes in the spring)
Individual course cost for non-members: $60

 

Show #16: Puss in Boots (aka The Booted Cat): From Straparola (fairy she-cat), Basile (Baroque-funny), and Perrault (petty-bourgeois meh)… to Shrek (feministico-hilarious).

Download: Secretsofthefairies2013-7-3

Secretsofthefairies2013-7-3

Puss in Boots (aka The Booted Cat):

From Straparola (fairy she-cat), Basile (Baroque-funny), and Perrault (petty-bourgeois meh)…
to Shrek (feministico-hilarious).

Show #13: This, that, education, and even Doctor Who

Thalia advocated that the next Doctor Who should be a women! As is often the case, we chatted on this and that but also on the education system and how fairy tales are sorely missed. We learned a lot from the late Joseph Campbell about the role of myth in shaping our minds and society–we will be dedicating lots of air time to education in the immediate future.

Excellent clip on what’s so wrong with the education system

Sir Ken Robinson is a world expert and education reform advocate. His main ideas are summarized in this brilliant short clip.
BTW: There are lots of wonderful RSA Animate clips like this with leading experts accompanied by this animation.