ITAL 2271/REES 2271 Space, Invention, and Wonder in Fairy Tales, Literature and Film

Spring 2024

Image of moon with a face
Before Apollo 11, the Space Shuttle, and the Mars Rover, people designed new space travel technologies and explored space in the fairy tales they wrote and told.  Fairy tale characters flew through the sky in fantastic ships and used telescopes to see great distances. And when astronomers like Johannes Kepler needed to introduce controversial theories, they sometimes did it in fairy tales rather than scientific papers. Wonder was the cognitive emotion that linked fairy tales, scientific practice, and interplanetary travel. Fairy tales were, in many instances, if not science fiction as we know it, then science fictions.  In this course, we’ll study all of these concepts by reading Russian and Italian fairy tales and viewing fairy tale films made by French, Russian, and Mexican directors.