Moral Tales Research Articles

The Skin of Our Teeth, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

<i>The Skin of Our Teeth</i>, PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

‘Small Existential Fractures and an Interrogative Relationship with the World’: An Existentialist Reading of Frances Hardinge’s A Face Like Glass

Philosophical approaches to children’s literature constitute a burgeoning area of the field. This article focuses on the existentialist dimension of A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge. The Heideggerian existentialist analysis of the novel examines the ambiguity of childhood, its temporality, adult–child power relations, existential fractures, and potency. In this radical fantasy, the positive power of a protagonist who privileges her being-with-others can transform social inequality. This moral fantasy tale links to contemporary society, referencing complex political and social issues, and cautions against extreme societal control.

In Defense of Moral Contagion: Annie Vivanti's Naja Tripudians and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

In Annie Vivanti’s Naja Tripudians (1920), London has been struck by a moral contamination that, spreading out from the center, has reached the sleepy rural village of Wild-Forest, where it will infect and eventually consume Leslie and Myosotis Harding. Though their father is a contagious disease specialist, he proves entirely incapable of protecting them from this contagion—and not only because it is home-grown. Perhaps more significantly his failure has to do his reliance on strategies of isolation and confinement, which not only prove ineffective in shielding his daughters from danger but also render them paradoxically more susceptible to the contagion. Although the novel was written during the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, critics have given little attention to the figures of immunity and contagion that structure the novel. By attending to these discourses, I argue that this novel can be read as anticipating in important respects Esposito's reflections on immunity. Though many have seen Naja Tripudians as a morality tale, I argue that the novel is better understood as a kind of 'anti-morality' tale, warning against the immoral things that result from resisting immoral things. The immunitary logic of the novel seems to suggest, in the end, that the preservation of moral virtue requires that we expose ourselves to the source of contamination, perhaps that we even behave a little badly ourselves.

Cultural Representations of Other-than-Human Nature

Cultural Representations of Other-than-Human Nature

Some aspects of virtue during the Yuan epoch

This article studies the attitude of the state towards the display of filial piety, widow’s chastity, and similar acts of righteousness during the Mongolian rule in China. Moral tales about virtuous deeds had been spreading in China since old times. Were they considered a dogma during the period in scope, or was the perception of such stories changing over time? Sources of legal nature show that some examples of filial piety had not been approved or had been as well prohibited even before the foundation of the Yuan state (1271–1368). The article also analyzes the contradiction of some virtue acts with the laws of those times. The criteria, upon which virtuous people were to be recommended for reward, as well as the corresponding procedure of recommendation are discussed. In addition, the question of whether virtuous behavior promised any material benefits is noteworthy.

J. K. Rowling, Chaucer’s Pardoner, and the Ethics of Reading

This essay discusses teaching Chaucer’s Pardoner and his Tale through his queerness and fitness to tell a moral tale. It is informed by ethical reading theory and pursues a comparison between the Pardoner and J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s public comments about trans women have disaffected many fans of her book and film series, and I suggest that wrestling with such dilemmas in the classroom provides students with tools to navigate similar ethical problems outside of an academic setting.&nbsp

The animals in moral tales: Does character realism influence children’s prosocial response to stories?

Previous research has suggested that moral stories depicting realistic characters may better facilitate children’s prosocial behavior than those containing anthropomorphized animal characters. The current study is a conceptual replication with a different sample and an extended age range. We examined the relationships among story character realism (anthropomorphized animal or human), theme (sharing or busyness), age, and prosocial behavior (i.e., resource allocation). Four versions of an illustrated storybook were created: an Animal Sharing book, an Animal Busy book, a Human Sharing book, and a Human Busy book. A total of 179 children aged 3–7 years listened to one of the four versions of the story. Children’s sticker donating behavior was measured prior to hearing the story and again following a story recall task. All groups donated more stickers post-story than pre-story. Younger children were more likely to increase their donation than older children, and children who had made higher human internal state attributions in a previous experimental session donated more stickers post-story. In contrast to previous research, we found that a sharing-themed narrative depicting human characters was no more influential for sticker donation than the other stories.

Said the Hooker to the Thief

Said the Hooker to the Thief

Две версии предательства Иуды: Сказание Иеронима и «Трагедия о Иуде, принце искариотском» А. М. Ремизова

The perception of Judas Iscariot in world culture has repeatedly changed. The evangelists’ scant information about him in medieval apocrypha was overgrown with bizarre episodes. The image of the traitor disciple in the works of Modern age was often subjected to reflection, complication and even “rehabilitation”. The extreme points in the spectrum of possible interpretations of this image are revealed by the comparison of A. M. Remizov’s play “The Trage-dy of Judas, Prince of Iscariot” (1909) with its Old Russian source – The Tale of Jerome about Judas the Traitor. The moral Tale, according to the author’s idea, was supposed to prove the innate depravity of the future traitor of the Messiah, whose life path, even before meeting the Teacher, was burdened with the atrocities of Cain and Oedipus. But the unequivocally negative assessment of Judas in the Tale was hindered by the medieval tradition of using the Oedipus plot as an illustration of the Christian dogma of repentance and redemption. In the A. M. Remizov’s play the schematism of the original source is not only overcome, but also the image of the title character is consciously enlarged, and turned into a hero of the trag-edy of rock. The betrayal of Judas is also reinterpreted in the play, and became strangely symmetrical to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. The prince Judas, persecuted by fate, with-out even discussing the possible path of repentance, consciously sacrificed immortality with his soul for the salvation of mankind. This version of the evangelistic betrayal reflected not only the ideas of Gnosticism, which was popular at that time, but also the moral aspects of the activities of revolutionary terrorists discussed by Russian society at the beginning of the 20th century.

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Text, context, affect and effect: Fairy tales in the UNICEF advertising campaign against paedophilia

AbstractBy conveying traditions and moral values fairy tales constitute an important part of our lives and cultural identities. Fairy tale motifs and allusions have been repeatedly employed for commercial and non-commercial purposes by advertisers around the world. This paper looks at the UNICEF anti-sexting advertising campaign that features two classic fairy tales,Hansel and GretelandLittle Red Riding Hood. Sexting is a growing problem among young people these days. According to the recent EU Kids Online 2020 survey carried out in 19 European countries, 22 percent of children aged 12-16, on average, have had some experience with receiving sexual messages or pictures. Through an analysis of the visual and verbal content of selected advertisements, the present study investigates how the advertisers creatively make use of the famous fairy tales to raise public awareness of the issue.

Past Forward: Electricity’s Perilous Narrative Arc

Summary form only given, as follows. In L. Frank Baum’s 1901 classic "The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale", Rob Josyln, a young boy who is wild about all things electrical, accidentally summons the Demon of Electricity to his attic workshop. Similarly to the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, the demon offers Rob three gifts for each of the next three weeks to demonstrate the extraordinary potential of electricity. The fantastical inventions Rob receives foreshadow modern-day Tasers, streaming video, and augmentedreality glasses. Adventure and near disaster ensue. Eventually, Rob decides to avoid further mishap and politely refuses any more gifts. In his sci-fi morality tale, Baum seems to recognize that the world of 120 years ago was not prepared for this futuristic technology. Are we ready now?

Childhood and nature in the Iranian post-war film Willow and Wind (Talebi 1999)

Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s forgotten masterpiece Beed-o Baad (Willow and Wind) () is an Iranian children film written by Abbas Kiarostami, that pays tribute to the children of the post-war generation. As in other children’s films of the period, the young hero has a mission, which he stubbornly pursues. Set in a village in Northern Iran, the story follows the boy’s efforts to repair a broken glass during very stormy weather. This article will examine the visual motives of Willow and Wind (a boy climbing a hill, single trees, wind, rain) paying particular attention to the interaction with nature. The tree and the wind alluded to in the title underline the struggle and determination of Iranian children. In line with the children’s films produced by the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (CIDCYA, aka Kanoon), it applauds the willpower of a generation with enormous responsibilities, while placing his protagonist as a role model for audiences of all ages. However, by rejecting the happy ending, the film opposes the predominant narrative model of Iranian educational films of the 1980s and 1990s while criticizing adults’ treatment of boys in post-revolutionary Iran. In this moral tale, Talebi stresses the dignity and resourcefulness of rural Iran but condemns the solitude of children, and the distance between the worlds of adults and children setting a precedent for future Iranian children’s films.

Delightful Futuristic Mormon Morality Tale Offers Teaching Tool for Progressive Parents

Delightful Futuristic Mormon Morality Tale Offers Teaching Tool for Progressive Parents

Unfair Acts and Practices: A Revisionist History

The Federal Trade Commission Act’s ban on “unfair . . . acts and practices” would, on its face, seem to give the FTC an awesome power to define proper treatment of consumers in changing conditions. But even in a world of widespread corporate surveillance, ongoing racial discrimination, impenetrably complex financial products, pyramid schemes, and more, the unfairness authority is used rarely, mostly in egregious cases of wrongdoing. Why? The standard explanation is that the more expansive notion of unfairness was tried in the 1970s, and it failed spectacularly. The FTC of this era was staffed by bureaucrats convinced of their own moral superiority and blind to the self-correcting dynamics of the market. When the FTC finally reached too far and tried to ban television advertising of sugary cereals to children, it undermined its own legitimacy, causing Congress to put pressure on the agency to narrow its definition of unfairness. This Article argues that this standard explanation gets the law and the history wrong, and, thus, that the FTC’s unfairness authority is more potent than commonly assumed. The regulatory initiatives of the 1970s were actually quite popular. The backlash against them was led by the businesses whose profit margins they threatened. Leaders of these businesses had become increasingly radicalized and well-organized and brought their new political clout to bear on an unsuspecting FTC. It was not the re-articulation of the unfairness standard in 1980 that narrowed unfairness to its current form, but rather the subsequent takeover of the FTC by neoliberal economists and lawyers who had been supported by these radicalized business leaders. The main limitation on the use of the unfairness authority since then has been the ideology of regulators charged with its enforcement. In fact, the conventional morality tale about the FTC’s efforts in the 1970s are part of what keeps this ideology dominant. A reconsideration of the meaning of unfairness requires situating the drama of the 1970s and 80s in a longer struggle over governance of consumer markets. Since the creation of the FTC, and even before, an evolving set of coalitions have battled over what makes markets fair. These coalitions can be divided roughly into those who favor norm setting by government agencies informed by experts held accountable to democratic publics and those who favor norm setting by business leaders made accountable via the profit motive. The meaning of “unfair . . . acts and practices” has been defined and redefined through these struggles, and it can and should be redefined again to reconstruct the state capacity to define standards of fair dealing.

Rape Appraisals: Class Mobility, Social Geography, and Sexual Morality Tales in Ghana, South Africa, and Rwanda

Interdisciplinary scholarship in violence and trauma studies suggest that a person’s interpretation of stressful events contours how the person will respond. It is through the two-part appraisal process that survivors determine how they will cope. This project utilizes an identity-based approach to demonstrate that survivors use group-based ideologies such as social class, geography, gender, sexuality, and, for some, race to appraise their accounts of violence, assess their coping strategies, and manage traumatic events. Using the cross-cultural accounts of 146 Black Ghanaian, South African, and Rwandan women rape survivors, the findings extend the appraisal approach by highlighting how survivors in this study utilized sexual morality tales to construct a variety of appraisal accounts to interpret their assaults and to justify their coping strategies. I call these appraisals opportunities, possibilities, limitations, and solidarities. These differing appraisals demonstrated that social milieu contours the psychological experience of violence and can engender both parallel and divergent interpretations across social class and cultural contexts. Last, the implications of these findings for comparative sexual assault studies, theories of traumatic coping, gender and development, and intersectionality are discussed.

Holding back and hidden family displays: Reflections on aunthood as a morally charged category

This article explores aunthood as a morally charged category. By conducting a thematic analysis, we analyse advice-seeking posts published in Dear Savvy Auntie, an American online advice forum for aunts. We examine the moral tales of aunthood and particularly why some aunts might feel that they cannot openly articulate their sense of responsibility within the family context, and the consequences of this. This leads us to assert that one way of ‘doing’ moral aunthood can be a form of non-doing, and allows us to examine how aunthood is done and displayed in ways which are often hidden and unacknowledged. We suggest that caution, avoidance and self-restraint may be routine aspects of displaying aunthood and of working out family responsibilities and family obligations.

The language of shame: a study of emotion in an early-twentieth century Urdu children’s periodical (Phūl)

ABSTRACT This article explores the vocabulary used for shame in a children’s periodical from Lahore, in colonial North India. Following decades of reconfigurations of norms of behaviour and of akhlaq (moral, ethical) literature, Phūl (‘Flower’) was one of the first periodicals for children, and one with the longest run. Using emotions, it aimed to entertain as much as to educate the young Urdu-reading public. Thanks to a careful examination of every weekly number through the year 1910 – the first full year of publication –, the objective is to highlight the various meanings and uses of shame in early twentieth-century Urdu children’s literature. In Phūl, shame was consistently expressed by the term sharm, with only rare exceptions. This conspicuously contrasts with the resort to diverse terms for contemporary representations of community shame and dishonour in the male public sphere since the late nineteenth century. Through typical animal stories, moral tales and illustrations, this article highlights how contributors used shame to monitor children’s emotions and behaviour. Despite its striking homogeneity of vocabulary, however, sharm involved a full palette of nuances, from the isolating emotion elicited by transgression (the ‘blackness’ of shame) to the very condition of respect, without which social cohesion was impossible. I argue that, crucial for the enculturation of morality, good manners, and gendered expectations, sharm was more semantically capacious than what we label as shame in English, notably by encompassing aspects which some, in Ruth Benedict’s and Eric R. Dodds’ steps, have associated to a different and sometimes opposite concept: guilt.

Uma visão filosófica do ser: A vida dos animais e o conto “The glass abattoir”, de JM Coetzee A Philosophical Vision about being: The Life of Animals and the short story The “Glass Abbatoir”, by JM Coetzee

Este artigo analisa “The glass abattoir”, um dos contos de Moral tales (COETZEE, no prelo b), entendido como uma sequência de A vida dos animais (COETZEE, 2003), ambos escritos por JM Coetzee. Buscaremos compreender o movimento do autor na direção da ética em favor do direito à vida dos animais, questionando os códigos morais que justificam o consumo de carne. Coetzee transita pelo discurso filosófico em ambas as obras, refutando a existência de uma superioridade humana sobre esses animais. Em ambos os textos, a personagem principal é Elizabeth Costello, considerada alter ego de Coetzee. No conto, ela assume o inconformismo do autor com relação à forma que nós, indivíduos onívoros, tratamos os animais que comemos e estabelecemos um “equilíbrio ecológico” ao decidir quais, como e quando morrem. Mostramos que, em “The glass abattoir”, a personagem rompe com os discursos e planeja tornar fisicamente visível o que ocorre dentro dos abatedouros.

A beautiful and devilish thing: children’s picture books and the 1914 Christmas Truce

For over half a century, the ‘imagining’ of the Great War in the UK has been framed by the existence of two Western Fronts, one literary and the other historical. The authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, whose work has traditionally reflected a society’s values and pre-occupations, have remained remarkably faithful to the literary construct of the war as a futile and meaningless conflict that destroyed a generation. This article analyses four children’s picture books dealing with the Christmas Truce of 1914, which has become an historical touchstone for adherents of the literary imagining. Using methods grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), visual grammar and art theory, the authors explore how text and image combine to create moving and insightful morality tales that use the particularities of an historical event to communicate a vision of humanity rather than a work of historical scholarship.