Fairy Tales: Looking Back... Beginning to End.

I've always been a reader, since I was a little girl.  I'd sit in a comfy chair and drift into all kinds of worlds, any that would take me far away from chores, school, parents and to flying carpets, handsome princes and talking animals.
I feel like a lot of fairy tales have been created to create another world to fall into, and come back to the real world prepared and full of knowledge.  From this class I have learned meaning behinds the objects in fairy tales and analyzed the main parts of the story.  I have learned about the origin of tales and the ideas behind the stories.  Cultures fit into each of the stories and thus we can find out the most important values in each culture.  I learned a lot from all the different guest speakers about their cultures and how they tell their fairy tales.  There is a big difference for all the fairy tales in different cultures and their meanings to us. For example to the bangladesh culture, it is a belief for them unlike us and how we find it almost adorable to see little fairy tale motifs in movies, or even combined all together.

However there are other ways to use fairy tales other than as means of entertainment or teaching small children our values.  We can find our hurt selves in our favorite fairy tales.  Through psychological means we can sort out a mental or hidden problem by discussing fairy tales.  This is very interesting to me especially since it's hard enough to fix some mentally disturbing problems with some therapy.
From the many lessons and discussions in class i'd say some of my favorite activities would be drawing a favorite scene and giving an oral presentation on a small reading about a view point of fairy tales.  I loved watching pans labyrinth and talking about the hidden motifs.  I believe we should talk more about the modern fairy tales happening now a days. Such as in shrek, or the new red riding hood.
Overall I thoroughly  enjoyed this class because of the discussion and all the new things we learned.  I know a lot more about fairy tales then I started off with.

Fairy Tales: Dr. Mian's Lecture

This lecture was a very interesting one because of the cultures these folktales were told in.  It is very different from our way of seeing folktales.  This was very interesting to me because, many people see fairytales as a means of entertainment and small stories made for children to learn rules.  In this culture it's different, they see it as a strong belief for all generations. An example if this strong belief is the Taj Mahal, built out of a story, the tomb proves it real.  The word for fairy tales is "Ropkoth" meaning "beautiful words."   I find this very interesting because that is what fairy tales, it is necessary to inspire us and make us believe in something, because those words are beautiful.  In general, the story-line is based on good vs. evil and greed vs. generosity, vice vs. virtue.  However, in a lot of stories virtue is rewarded, like normal, but evil instead of being turned around and taught is punished and harshly.  Characters in these stories are generally demons and monsters as well as royalty.  This is somewhat normal, as well as talking animals which is very constant in some our cultures stories.  Magic is highly believed in, as well as animal-plant-monster transformations.  For example, a widely known talking animal is the "wise parrot" which appears on several occasions in the Bangladesh stories.  We also reviewed the story of Neelkamal and Lalkamal.  This was a story very similar to some of our culture's fairy tales.  There was a demon queen which is similar to the evil stepmother.  Overall these stories are somewhat similar, the difference is that they believe in their stories more than we do, they have respect for the stories and their origins.