Aesop's Fables Research Articles

Macrostructure in Aesop's Fables: Gains and Pitfalls in Determining Production and Comprehension in Aphasia

Macrostructure in Aesop's Fables: Gains and Pitfalls in Determining Production and Comprehension in Aphasia

Marie de France: a critical companion

Marie de France is the author of some of the most influential and important works to survive from the middle ages; arguably best-known for her 'Lais', she also translated Aesop's Fables (the 'Ysope'), and wrote the 'Espurgatoire seint Patriz' (St Patrick's Purgatory), based on a Latin text. The aim of this Companion is both to provide information on what can be gleaned of her life, and on her poetry, and to rethink standard questions of interpretation, through topics with special relevance to medieval literature and culture. The variety of perspectives used highlights both the unity of Marie's 'oeuvre' and the distinctiveness of the individual texts. After situating her writings in their Anglo-Norman political, linguistic, and literary context, this volume considers her treatment of questions of literary composition in relation to the circulation, transmission, and interpretation of her works. Her social and historical engagements are illuminated by the prominence of feudal vocabulary, while her representation of movement across different geographical and imaginary spaces opens a window on plot construction. Repetition and variation are considered as a narrative technique within Marie's work, and as a cultural practice linking her texts to a network of twelfth-century textual traditions. The Conclusion, on the posterity of her 'oeuvre', combines a consideration of manuscript context with the ways in which later authors rewrote Marie's works. Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz; Peggy McCracken is Professor of French, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

How Do Children Solve Aesop's Fable?

Studies on members of the crow family using the “Aesop's Fable” paradigm have revealed remarkable abilities in these birds, and suggested a mechanism by which associative learning and folk physics may interact when learning new problems. In the present study, children between 4 and 10 years of age were tested on the same tasks as the birds. Overall the performance of the children between 5–7-years was similar to that of the birds, while children from 8-years were able to succeed in all tasks from the first trial. However the pattern of performance across tasks suggested that different learning mechanisms might be being employed by children than by adult birds. Specifically, it is possible that in children, unlike corvids, performance is not affected by counter-intuitive mechanism cues.

ALEXANDER PETTIT (ed.). Early Works: 'Aesop's Fables', 'Letters Written to and for Particular Friends', and Other Works. By Samuel Richardson. * ALBERT J. RIVERO (ed.). Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. By Samuel Richardson.

ALEXANDER PETTIT (ed.). Early Works: 'Aesop's Fables', 'Letters Written to and for Particular Friends', and Other Works. By Samuel Richardson. * ALBERT J. RIVERO (ed.). Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. By Samuel Richardson.

Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose by Leslie Kurke

178 PHOENIX labeled, and accurate. One quirk that annoyed this reviewer was the insertion of lighthearted subtitles to introduce highly technical material in Chapter Five on Canonic Theory in particular. Such irrelevant phrases as “Mules, semitones, and lukewarm coffee” (233), “The sore thumb: canonic division and the octave plus fourth” (239), and “Babylonios temptare numeros” (332), the latter leading to a footnote, “With apologies to Horace (Carm. I.11.2–3),” seemed miscalculated in a text which otherwise insists on mathematical precision. One problem well out of the author’s control is the extremely tight binding (at least on the review copy), which makes accessing the text block unnecessarily difficult and cumbersome for a book so worthy of careful study. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jon Solomon Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. By Leslie Kurke. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010. Pp. xxi, 495. Leslie Kurke finds in Aesop far more than he appears to offer on the surface. In Aesopic Conversations, the simple tales and roguish persona of the legendary fabulist become the basis for an expansion of the author’s decades-long investigations into the nature of the relationship between the sociopolitical and generic dimensions of literature.1 According to Kurke, Aesopic fables are marked as “popular” and “abject” (4) in Greek culture, providing a useful low end for her rigorous model of literary-generic hierarchy. Because the texts and traditions that comprise Aesopica are both “low” and “open, fluid, anyone’s property” (10), Kurke is able to approach Aesopica as a form of “common culture” (8) in which both elite and non-elite participate. Thus the title of this superb and original book invokes a number of different “conversations”: between the high and the low in ancient Greek culture; between the disempowered and their oppressors; between the “Aesopic” Socrates and his interlocutors; between Herodotus the logopoios and his poetic predecessors; and even the exchanges between sub-disciplines within the contemporary academy. Who would have believed that the humble Aesop could incite so much discourse? Building upon the pioneering work of Jack Winkler and Keith Hopkins,2 Kurke was initially drawn to Aesopica in the hopes that somewhere in the motley corpus of fables, proverbs, and biographical legends associated with Aesop she might excavate remnants of the “elusive quarry” (2) of Greek popular culture. In the rich and admirably reflective “Introduction” (1–49), Kurke announces her intention to read the Lives of Aesop and other Aesopica “symptomatically for ideologies and for cultural contestation” (25), in 1 For example, L. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca 1991); ead., “The Politics of Æbrosœnh in Archaic Greece,” CA 11 (1992) 90–121; ead., “Crisis and Decorum in Sixth-Century Lesbos: Reading Alkaios Otherwise,” QUCC n.s. 47.2 (1994) 67–92; ead., Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Ancient Greece (Princeton 1999); ead., “The Strangeness of ‘Song Culture’: Archaic Greek Poetry,” in O. Taplin (ed.), Literature in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A New Perspective (Oxford 2000) 58–87. 2 J. J. Winkler, Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1985); K. Hopkins, “Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,” Past and Present 138 (1993) 3–27. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 179 order to shed light on the interaction of popular and high cultural forms in ancient Greece, and ultimately on the origins of Greek prose writing. This approach naturally divides the book into two equal parts: In Part I, “Competitive Wisdom and Popular Culture” (51–237), the focus is on the figure of Aesop as a non-philosophical sage figure who stands both within and outside of the elite wisdom tradition; in Part II, “Aesop and the Invention of Greek Prose” (241–431), Kurke argues that Aesop stood as an important (if deeply problematic) model for early and formative experiments in Greek prose writing. Most of the arguments in Part I involve Kurke’s groundbreaking and sophisticated approach to the text(s) of the Life of Aesop. While there have been a number of valuable studies of the Life of Aesop in recent decades, few...

Aesopic Fables in the European and the Modern Greek Enlightenment

Aesopic fables constitute an important case in popular literature. This genre went through various stages of development, as its practical and educational value was recognized from the beginning; its plasticity, pedagogical dimension and mainly its ability to convey messages through an indirect and pleasant way prompted many to take interest in it, reading, adapting or even creating new fables. Initially, these fables were developed for use in linguistic education and later they assumed a pedagogical and simultaneously literary character, while, in many cases, they became a means of indirect expression and protest. Even though generation and adaptation of fables was recorded in almost every era and country, it was greatly increased with the movement of the European (1687-1789) and of the Modern Greek Enlightenment (1750-1821). The messages of these fables appeared to be aiming at the liberation of man from ignorance and superstition. This paper aims to demonstrate this ‘Aesopic production’ specifically in the time of the Enlightenment (or shortly thereafter, influenced by its spirit), presenting related works in Europe and Greece.

Dances with magpies

Summary As the Scientist in Residence at the UK's oldest contemporary dance company, Cambridge professor Nicola Clayton uses her research on corvids and children to provide inspiration for Mark Baldwin's choreography. Michael Gross caught up with their latest moves.

The tortoise and the hare

Everyone is familiar with Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare. Although the hare was faster over short distances, it was the plodding tortoise which won the race. The recent history of policies and initiatives to address inequalities in health is littered with harebrained schemes, exchanging long-term effect for short-term display. Many of these schemes are conceived in mad March, when there is end of year money to spend. Like genetically-programmed crops, they disappear when the year is out. Deep End GPs describe the life cycle of many community initiatives which, by the time they get established and become useful, are already starting to wind down. In maintaining a list of local community resources, the continuing challenge is to keep up to date. Health check programmes are also in vogue and can process large numbers of people through the initial stages of risk assessment, but when most of the resource goes into the beginning of the process, is it a wonder that such programmes fizzle out? A frequent notion of initiatives …

Of Snakes and Men: Toni and Slade Morrison's and Pascal Lemaître's Adaptations of Aesop in <i>Who's Got Game?</i>

Toni and Slade Morrison and Pascal Lemaitre's reworkings of three of Aesop's fables, collected in a combined edition under the title of Who's Got Game? in 2007, were first published as individual children's books in 2003, each bearing a main title relating to the ancient original but framing its title significantly as a question: Ant or the Grasshopper? Lion or the Mouse? or the Snake? first of these is probably the best known of the fables attributed to Aesop. second, which reflects upon the use of power and clemency, the code of gratitude, and the situational definition of power, has been adapted in many versions. Poppy or the Snake?--a seemingly simple narrative that takes as its hypotext (or originary text) (1) a lesser-known fable called the The Countryman and the Snake (2)--concerns ill-judged acts of charity and the inadvisability of bringing snakes into your home, or as it is phrased in Ben Edwin Perry's translation of Babrius and Phaedrus, the tenet that To Pity the Pitiless Is Folly (187). context and motivations for the series, which will eventually comprise retellings of six of Aesop's fables, can be examined in relation to four key considerations. First, Morrison became well acquainted with the classics as a part of her formal education; Marc C. Conner comments that by the time began teaching in the late 1950s, she had studied Latin for four years, taken degrees in classics and literature, and written a Master's Thesis that employed structures of Greek tragedy to understand the work of Faulkner and Woolf; thus, any critical view that would blind itself to her training in a western, even classical background is misguided (xii). (3) Second, as Anne Lake Prescott notes at the end of her review of Annabel Patterson's Fables of Power (1991), is an important fable tradition in America derived from a black slave community born and bred in the briar patch of oppression and enforced double meanings (548-49). One could expand this point by observing that there is an affinity between African tales--which frequently involve animals such as Ananu or Anansi the Spider--and the instructive tales of the Aesopian tradition; and indeed the latter may well have been drawn, to a greater or lesser extent, from vernacular tales circulated in various parts of the ancient world. (4) Third, Aesop, who according to legend was born a slave and was deformed in body, represents an instance of the wise outsider gifted with trenchant yet subtly couched powers of expression. (The Roman writer Phaedrus, a less-noted fabulist who set Aesop's tales in verse, was also an ex-slave). (5) Fourth, the status of fables is curiously mixed, moving between the realms of the tract, particularly adapted to the instruction of children and easily taken up by those with vested ideological interests, (6) and the multivalent text which is open to diverse applications and interpretations. (7) Aside from the enduring influence of fables within European and world culture, English translations and adaptations of Aesop and other fabulists are innumerable; these have been variously dress'd, as the title of Bernard Mandeville's translation of Jean de La Fontaine's Fables puts it, in familiar and contemporary language for the readier understanding of their readers, and sometimes they may be directed to new, more open, or divergent frameworks--as indicated by the title of Lloyd W. Daly's 1961 volume, Aesop without Morals. Fables, with or without stated morals, are still very much alive in our time. This essay examines how the fine line between the moral and moralistic is handled in the Morrisons' and Lemaitre's reworkings; how the authors draw upon different source materials and mythic associations; and how the stories are directed to the interests of the contemporary child reader in such a manner as to sustain inquiry and provoke interrogation (not just in their endings, but throughout). …

Refleksje teoretyczne na temat bajki ezopowej w Rosji w XVIII w.

In the present paper describes theoretical statements of the 18th century Russian authors are described on Aesop's fable published in the introductions, forewords, dedicatory inscriptions to the collections of fairy tales. This literary genre appeared in Russia at the beginning of the 17th century. In 1607, Fyodor Gozvinsky translated Aesop's fables from Greek into Old Church Slavonic (prose). Next two also prosaic translations of works of antique fabulist were prepared in 17th century by Andrey Vinyus and Pyotr Kashinskiy. In 18th century, Sergey Volchkov translated the German translation of a French collection of fairy tales by Aesop and other antique and modern fabulists.

Fable and Lutheranization in 16th and early 17th century Sweden

This paper argues that the Reformation and the adoption of Lutheranism as a state religion had a great and lasting impact on the history of the Aesopic fable in Sweden. During the 16th and early 17th century, it is shown, the genre was explicitly Lutheranized and ascribed vital functions in the process of Lutheran confessionalization within the Swedish national state. In particular, it is demonstrated how the fable – following the models of Melanchthon and Luther – was used in the teaching of classical languages at school and, in the Swedish language, served as an instrument for the moral and religious education of the common people.

Animal Cognition: Aesop's Fable Flies from Fiction to Fact

A new study shows that rooks are able to spontaneously drop stones into a tube of water to obtain a floating worm. This sophisticated problem solving raises intriguing questions about the use of imagination in animals.

Rooks Use Stones to Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm

In Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher," a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher and quench its thirst. A number of corvids have been found to use tools in the wild, and New Caledonian crows appear to understand the functional properties of tools and solve complex physical problems via causal and analogical reasoning. The rook, another member of the corvid family that does not appear to use tools in the wild, also appears able to solve non-tool-related problems via similar reasoning. Here, we present evidence that captive rooks are also able to solve a complex problem by using tools. We presented four captive rooks with a problem analogous to Aesop's fable: raising the level of water so that a floating worm moved into reach. All four subjects solved the problem with an appreciation of precisely how many stones were needed. Three subjects also rapidly learned to use large stones over small ones, and that sawdust cannot be manipulated in the same manner as water. This behavior demonstrates a flexible ability to use tools, a finding with implications for the evolution of tool use and cognition in animals.

Feeling with Fish

Animals are good to think with, as Aesop's fables and the Muppets attest. They are even better to feel with; consider Marley and Me; Knut, the Berlin zoo's star polar bear; and the late, lamented A...

Dosso Dossi: paintings of myth, magic, and the antique

In Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique, Giancarlo Fiorenza draws on a wealth of rarely studied primary source material to present the work of the Ferrarese court artist Dosso Dossi in a new light. The artist, who worked mainly for Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara, is celebrated for his mythological paintings that spoke to the courtly imagination. Fiorenza focuses on Dosso's highly allusive and eloquent portrayal of ancient and vernacular subjects found in such well-known works as Jupiter Painting Butterflies, Myth of Pan, Enchantress, and his frescoes of Aesop's fables. Dosso's art challenges conventional iconographic analysis, and Fiorenza considers how the poetics governing his imagery recasts literary sources, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, by magnifying their most pictorial components. Perhaps more compellingly than any of his contemporaries, Dosso's paintings transformed courtly ideals and princely identity into a new sensual spirit.

Metaphorical Stories for Education About Mental Health Challenges and Stigma

In 1989, my psychiatrist convinced me to present to a small group of parents of people with mental health challenges. I had terrible stage fright, but I coped well. It was such a success that I was invited to present to other groups. Thus, I started presenting to groups and other audiences. In this article, I want to share my experience using metaphorical stories when presenting. The more I presented to different audiences, the more I found I was trying to explain complicated matters. It is not enough to want to communicate with someone, and it is not enough that he or she wants to communicate with oneself. Suitable conditions are required for communication. Because I was captivated in my childhood by the fables of Aesop, La-Fontaine, and Krilov, I used in my presentations various fables and other types of metaphorical stories to bridge the gap of knowledge and to enable communication. When I could not find metaphorical stories to suit my presentations, I made them up.

Gestures Orchestrate Brain Networks for Language Understanding

Although the linguistic structure of speech provides valuable communicative information, nonverbal behaviors can offer additional, often disambiguating cues. In particular, being able to see the face and hand movements of a speaker facilitates language comprehension [1]. But how does the brain derive meaningful information from these movements? Mouth movements provide information about phonological aspects of speech [2-3]. In contrast, cospeech gestures display semantic information relevant to the intended message [4-6]. We show that when language comprehension is accompanied by observable face movements, there is strong functional connectivity between areas of cortex involved in motor planning and production and posterior areas thought to mediate phonological aspects of speech perception. In contrast, language comprehension accompanied by cospeech gestures is associated with tuning of and strong functional connectivity between motor planning and production areas and anterior areas thought to mediate semantic aspects of language comprehension. These areas are not tuned to hand and arm movements that are not meaningful. Results suggest that when gestures accompany speech, the motor system works with language comprehension areas to determine the meaning of those gestures. Results also suggest that the cortical networks underlying language comprehension, rather than being fixed, are dynamically organized by the type of contextual information available to listeners during face-to-face communication.

Aesop in Australian Reasons for Judgment

The paper discusses references, correct and incorrect, to Aesop's fables in Australian reasons for judgment.

The Picture of Nature: Seventeenth-Century English Aesop's Fables

This essay argues that illustrations to early modern Aesop's Fables, especially those by Francis Barlow, deserve attention as a distinct form of representation that offered meanings that were independent of the words they accompanied. Drawing on conventions of depiction germane to natural history illustration and landscape painting, the illustrations in these works invited a mode of reading that ran counter to the allegorical format of the tales they accompanied. By construing viewers as observers of nature, the illustrations asked readers to consider the most important epistemological questions of the modern era, what is nature to man, and man to nature? In the real world outside of these works the possibility of a non-allegorical relationship with nature had already been subsumed by the anti -allegorical relations established between nature and capital in mercantile imperialism, between dissection and truth in natural sciences, and between nature and property in political theory. The illustrations in seventeenth-century Aesop s can therefore be seen to reveal to us a strangely dilated and even fantastical moment in which it might have possible to imagine a nature that afforded us no surplus in economic, ontological, or even theological terms .

Governing the tongue: Heaney among the philosophers

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes From ‘Flight Path’, in Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996). According to the poem, the encounter occurred ‘One bright May morning, nineteen-seventy-nine’. This shift in IRA strategy led, for example, to the election of Bobby Sands as an MP in 1981. The man's demand for (presumably) a poem makes sense in light of the continuous use of poems (and ballads) as a feature of political action on both sides of the conflict in Ireland, since at least the seventeenth century. ‘Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?’ W.B.Yeats, ‘Man and the Echo’ (in Last Poems, 1939). See W.B.Yeats, The Poems, ed. D. Albright (London: J.M.Dent & Sons, 1990). A classic Irish example would be Patrick Pearse, but Yeats and the Field Day group (including Heaney himself) could also be mentioned. Michel Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, in Essential Works, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. J. Faubion (Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 343. French text in Dits et écrits 1954–1988: II 1970–1975, D. Defert and F. Ewald (eds.), (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Translation modified. Foucault's essay is a review of Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), two books which set themselves the task of ‘overturning Platonism’. Final lecture series, ‘Le courage de la vérité’, Collège de France, 1984. Unpublished; recordings available at Fonds Michel Foucault, l'IMEC, Caen. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber and Faber, 1989, p. xvi. Henceforth GT, with page numbers given in the text. This is Heaney's gloss. See The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 2. Henceforth RP, with page numbers given in the text. We can note that this quote is also used by Yeats as an epigraph to his strangely quietist poem ‘Politics’ (1938). Auden praises Yeats' poetry, but seems to deny its political efficacy. It is, however, debatable whether the poem as a whole is committed to such a blanket denial of the efficacy of poetry: ‘Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still/For poetry makes nothing happen’. W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, in E. Mendelson (ed.), W.H. Auden: Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, London, 1979), p. 82. I have principally used the following translation: Plato, The Republic, trans. D. Lee (Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1983). Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). The title of this collection refers to a builder's or carpenter's tool for measuring balance – which may be known to some readers simply as a ‘level’. By Carolyn Mulholland, a Northern Ireland sculptor. See, for example, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in which Yeats uses the phrase ‘once out of nature’; these poems also echo ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by Keats. In ‘Poet's Chair’ the word shoulder-blades is hyphenated, while in ‘The Swing’ it is not. I shall assume that this has no significance. Heaney is drawing on Plato's account of Socrates' last days. See, especially, the Phaedo. In the days before his execution, Socrates has been composing poetry in his cell (verses in praise of Apollo, and versions of Aesop's fables). No doubt this is the kind of poetry of which Plato could approve. See, Plato, Phaedo, 60d–61b. In Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (1991; London: Faber and Faber, 1966). The cultural and political relevance of excavation becomes central especially in the collection North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). See the works cited in note 3 and 4 above. And also: Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980; and, Heaney's Nobel acceptance speech ‘Crediting Poetry’ in Nobel Lectures (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006). Heaney is here quoting from Robert Lowell. A damson is a soft red fruit, a kind of plum. ‘Damson’ from The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1996 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC; and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The heraldic description of the badge of Ulster: ‘Argent, a sinister hand erect couped gules’. I would like to thank Dan Robins, whose detailed comments on an earlier draft helped to greatly improve the paper; and the anonymous referees for Textual Practice whose comments helped me to clarify my argument.