Overwhelming
I am now almost 10 pages into my research paper, and surprisingly I have found myself a little befuddled. There are a few things I think I can attribute to my confusion:
1. I am finding it difficult to deviate from my original sources and look to new ones. I feel compelled to read an entire book rather than choosing the most interesting/important parts that will help me write my paper.
2. I have found some dissenting points of view and I’m unsure so far as to how to deal with them.
3. I need a better way to organize my information.
Besides being a little overwhelmed, I am enjoying reading more about my topic and am slowly becoming more and more intrigued. After I feel like I have attacked this “chunk” that I’m working on now, I would really like to try to find some more research on how and why fairy tales are used for children’s education. I have a start to this, but I feel like there is probably a lot more information that I haven’t found yet.
Lots of Reading
Over the past several days I have been working a bit on two separate documents. The first document is fairly unstructured, basic text that I write as I read and find something useful or interesting. Whenever I get a chance during the day, I pick up on of my books and pick up where I left off and just start reading. I find it best that I have no specific intent when first reading, but rather reading just for the sake of enlightening myself about fairy tales. When I come across an interesting point, or note that one author’s opinion severely differs from one that I just read, I write about it. I have been doing this each day for the past 5 days or so, and have generated about 5 pages of information. This information is really only information so far – it still needs organization and rationale. However, I feel that as I learn more about fairy tales and what I want the specific purpose of my paper to be, this will be easier to do.
In addition to my “unorganized madness,” I’ve been keeping another document that is more of a plan, or outline, where I hope my writing and research takes me. It allows me to keep some basic form and clarity of thought in the back of my head while I write sometimes disjointedly about fairy tales while reading in my other document.
I have been learning a lot - there are many diverse opinions about the origin, nature, meaning and construction of fairy tales. So far, I have been writing about the oldest fairy tales and how they came to be. Some believe they originated from the dissemination of other mythical tales, such as the Odyssy, and some believe they contributed to the creation of larger mythical tales. Also, I have come to find a basic structure that most critics seem to agree on regarding the fairy tale, and that they have developed into much shorter, nicer stories today than they once were.
After writing a bit about the history of the fairy tale, I took one specific story, Sleeping Beauty, and compared different versions of it and what they mean and why this happened. Sleeping Beauty is a classic fairy tale and discussed much by the authors whose books I’m reading right now.
I will continue doing this for a while until I find a pattern in my research or some clear way to organize and continue with a more concise purpose.
Initial Research
Today I made a trip to the library to gather my initial research. Books are always the best place to start for me – concrete research I can read through to get an idea of where to start. As I was compiling my bibliography and reading through snippets of the text, I came across ideas and theories I had never thought of before. I discovered that there has recently been much controversy over fairy tales because of their oral nature. Fairy tales were not written until the early 1800s, yet they existed long before this time. I did not stop to think that the stories may have been abridged because of the difficulty in printing at that time in history. Therefore, many details may have been “lost in translation.”
Also, I was unaware of the major differences between stories about “fairyland,” “fairy tales,” and “folk tales.” There are specific qualities that define each genre. Stories about fairyland are generally fantasical in nature, and the stories take place in a world with which humans are not familiar, such as The Hobbit. All of the creatures and the physical landscape of The Hobbit are unfamiliar to human life. Fairy tales, on the other hand, have realistic qualities about them, with the addition of magic happenings, such as in Sleeping Beauty when the prince is able to awake Sleeping Beauty from a 100-year long sleep. Lastly, folk tales differ in the fact that they usually do not have happy endings, and meant to tell something very specific. For instance, Little Red Riding Hood warns children not to stray far from home and not to talk to strangers.
My next step is to narrow my topic even further, and decide which aspects of fairy tales I want to delve into and begin to write about. Right now, my plan is to research more about the specific timeline (as specific as it gets) regarding the origins and development of fairy tales and , how, where, and by whom they were told long ago. After I have a solid definition of a fairy tale and can trace is roots, I would like to examine several specific fairy tales in their original context, and in their context today. Tomorrow I will read more of my books and develop an outline of topics in order to start writing.
Fairy Tales
As I was thinking about honing in on a particular topic to rearch for my project, my head was tossing around different types of reserach I could do involving literature. This quarter I am taking a class called African American Literature. I just read a portion of our anthology about folktales and their origin and meaning. Set apart from African spirituals, rhymes, music, gospels, sermons, etc., folktales present something different altogether in their colorful nature and depth of meaning. After thinking about this for a while, I thought about my own personal “folktales,” or fairy tales I was told as a child.
Fairy tales are also a genre of literature often over-looked as fun, simple, and entertaining for children. However, their origins are anything but fun and simple. I would like to read about how fairy tales developed, how they related specifically to certain periods of time and history, and how/why they are still told today in a slightly different format.
In English classes, we often study the “canon,” the classics – Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Poe, Bronte, Fitzgerald, Hughes, etc. We learn how to read and write essays, analytical papers, poems, and short stories. We learn the proper elements of composition and how to use language correctly and effectively. However, I can’t recall a time in any English class where we read about fairy tales and their impact on society in their historical context.
Many people who know me know that I love Disney movies, fantasical and enchanting stories, and creativity. Fairy tales encase a fantasical, whimsical, and colorful nature, along with an often hidden depth of meaning. I think it would be fascinating to discover this hidden meaning in history and perhaps shed some light on the nature of fairy tales as they exist today.
Thinking thinking thinking
As I finish my last year of undergrad school and begin to think about the exciting and challenging years ahead of graduate school, I am very happy to be able to undertake and learn the process of writing a research paper. However, being a very technical writer in many senses, I often have difficulty with this type of task – it invovles taking a whole big mess of interests/unorganized thoughts, writing them down, and trusting that somewhere along the way you’ll start to develop a main idea, or concentration that your research and writing will focus on.
The first step in writing this paper is thinking about a topic – what do I like? What do I like that I might want to research further? What do I want to learn? Right now, my greatest interest is in English Literature and how I can best learn it and teach it to others. Perhaps I could write about changes in teaching, such as new technologies in the classroom. Or maybe I could write about a specific piece of work or author that I enjoy reading. However, I will be doing a lot of literary analysis this quarter, and maybe it would be a better idea to deviate a little and use this opporutnity to learn about something else.
Some of my other interests that may turn into reseach projects include cooking, exercising & sports (especially swimming), dancing, music, and animals. I like learning about new learnings involving nutrition and healthy lifestyles, such as the fairly new deveopment of the increasingly popular gluten-free lifestyle, which would be intersting to learn about. Also, I love animals, especially dogs. It may be interesting to read about the development of dogs as a pet, or maybe the development of a particular breed.
I have written one substantial research paper in my life – I wrote about music and its cognitive effects on humans in general. This was a complex subject but I loved what I was able to learn, and took away a great deal of knowledge from writing the paper. Whatever I choose to write about I want to be something that interests me and that I can learn from.
