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Podcast: Myth in the Mojave
Episode: Sleeping Beauty?: The Tale of Briar Rose
Description: Western culture has a love-hate relationship with fairy tales. They are trivial entertainment, guilty pleasures left over from childhood, and they are cultural dynamite we attempt to defuse with a range of feminist critiques and socio-psychological commentaries. We long for the “happily ever after” and also deride this sweet and simple view of life. Fairy tales trouble us. That is one of their cultural functions, and our endless reworking and revising tells us something about our hopes, tensions, and fears.In this program I tell the fairy tale Briar Rose, collected by the Brother’s Grimm...