See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/329781749

Fairy Tales, Folk-Psychology, and Learning Intersubjective Competency

Through Embodied Resonance: A Contribution to Debates on Cultural
Evolution, the Extended Mind, and Morality

Article in The Journal of Literature and Science · December 2018

DOI: 10.12929/jls.11.2.02

CITATIONS READS

2 1,871

1 author:

Naomi Rokotnitz
University of Oxford
20 PUBLICATIONS 80 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Naomi Rokotnitz on 19 December 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume 11, No. 2 (2018)
ISSN 1754-646XJournal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39
Naomi Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales, Folk Psychology, and Learning Intersubjective Competency”: 20-39

Fairy Tales, Folk-Psychology, and Learning Intersubjective

Competency Through Embodied Resonance: A Contribution to
Debates on Cultural Evolution, the Extended Mind, and Morality

Naomi Rokotnitz

Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that most mental processes and even
decision-making take place in a fraction of a second and are determined before they
reach conscious awareness (Gladwell; Vandekerckhove and Panksepp, “The Flow”).
Logic and analysis may “merely be ways of checking the appropriateness of the
choices made by the cognitive unconscious or a means of consolidating what we have
learned in long-term memory” (Lutterbie 98). Moreover, as Hugo Mercier and Dan
Sperber argue in The Enigma of Reason, reason is suspiciously underequipped to
ascertain truths and seems more likely to have evolved in order to communicate and
persuade. This (highly likely) possibility raises questions with regard to moral agency
and how moral preferences are formed and maintained. Cognitive philosophers Mark
Johnson and Owen Flanagan, and the scientists, philosophers and theorists who
contributed to the collection Flanagan recently co-edited with Gregg Caruso on
“neuroexistentialism” have begun to address these questions. Moral agency may be
further illuminated, I propose, by cognitive literary criticism. As Johnson has asserted,
works of art provide “heightened, intensified and highly integrated experiences of
meaning, using all our ordinary resources of meaning-making” and, thus, “we can find
no better examples of how meaning happens than by attending to the arts” (The
Meaning xii-xiii). This article examines fairy tales as examples of moralizing fictions
that have become cultural icons to which children are often introduced at a very
young age. Given the understanding we now have regarding the preconscious
dimensions of cognition, I ask: what can such tales teach us about moral agency
today?

Fairy Tales
Folk tales are presumed to have evolved as oral forms of tribal entertainment,
education, and moralizing, serving to comment upon and to shape most communities
across the globe. The European tradition of fairy tales flourished particularly in the
medieval period, when circulating oral tales that already interlaced aspects of myths,
legends, fables, and proverbs, were further infused with Christian themes and
symbols. Since that time, the tales have been told and retold, collected, embellished,
revised, and reconfigured to form “kaleidoscopic variations with distinctly different
effects” (Tatar ix). They thus reflect a cumulative collective folk-wisdom,
independent of individual authorship. Nonetheless, folklorist Jack Zipes reminds us
that, as a literary form, the fairytale only began to emerge in the fourteenth century,
and did not settle into a recognizable genre until the seventeenth century:

Certainly fairytale motifs can be found in ancient Indian, Chinese and

Arabic scripts, the Bible, Greek and Roman literature, and there are
numerous fairy-tale features and themes in medieval literature. . . .
However, there was no distinct and distinguishable genre in literature called
the fairy tale until the seventeenth century, first in Italy and more

20
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

importantly in France, because there was no textual community to cultivate

and institutionalize it and because the vernacular language had not yet fully
developed into literary languages. (Zipes, Why Fairy Tales 20-21)

In the transition from oral to printed material, folk stories about initiation rites,
maturation, integration of different aspects of the psyche and other psychological
elements of personal, sociocultural and religious importance were revised by male
writers in Europe, through their authorial choices. Zipes traces how, for example,
Charles Perrault “transformed an oral folk tale about social initiation of a young
woman into a narrative about rape in which the heroine is obliged to bear the
responsibility for sexual violation,” influencing “cultural hegemony” for many years
to come (Zipes, Why Fairy Tales 28).
Excellent scholarship has already been devoted to identifying and critiquing
the co-option of certain tales by various interested parties, whether religious authors
promoting their faith, nationalists seeking to define the character of their nation-states,
those concerned with the tales’ (in)appropriateness for children, and those revising
them for political gains (Teverson). The tales have been interpreted by some as
promulgating misogyny (Dworking), by others as destabilizing (latterly imposed)
gender stereotypes (Lurie; Minard) and encouraging radical subversion (Zipes, The
Art). They have been hailed by psychoanalysts interested in their intrapsychic and
developmental merits (Jung; Bettelhiem; Pincola Estes), deconstructed by feminists
(Gilbert and Gubar; Swann Jones) and adapted by postmodern revisionists for either
graphic novels, television or cinema (Frus and Williams; Kukkonen).
The tales have also already received some specifically cognitive-literary
attention. For instance, in his book The Great Fairy Tale Tradition and later in Why
Fairy Tales Stick, Jack Zipes offers some incisive suggestions for how the genre
“formed over thousands of years to stick in our brains in very peculiar ways ” (Why
Fairy Tales xii) and extends his analysis to cover postmodern pastiche, parodies and
imaginative extensions of key fairy tales in multiple stories, novels and films.
However, he does not attend to the physical dimensions of fictional engagement. The
analysis I offer here suggests that the staying power of these ever-evolving tales arises
in no small measure from the way the tales convey abstract ideas through concrete
images that appeal directly to readers’/listeners’ bodies. In addition to their thematic
effects, the tales also teach important social and moral lessons by accessing
readers’/listeners’ sensorimotor mechanisms. The tales thus regularly mobilize what
neuropsychologists Marie Vandekerckhove and Jaak Panksepp call our “affective
consciousness” (“A Neurocognitive Theory” 2017): a form of pre-reflective reception
that arises from bodily experience. Moreover, the tales often also combine this bodily
dimension of communication with the overt metanarrative thematization of
storytelling itself, thus edging involuntary responses closer to consciousness, and
elucidating processes by which the characters in the tales are made aware and are
spurred to respond to their predicament not only in thought but in action. These two
aspects of fairy tales, which form the locus of my argument here, continue to operate
consistently throughout their many evolutions and across the various communities
that have recycled and revised them. The tales thereby demonstrate how primal bodily
mechanisms, that precede and often preclude conscious intervention, are integral to
human understanding; how these bodily mechanisms underlie conscious formulations
of experience and the life-stories to which they contribute; and how literature both
relies upon and further develops this interchange.

21
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

Intersubjective Competence
It is today largely accepted by scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind that
the body and the brain are inextricably linked: mind is the product of both. Indeed,
“all human processes of perception and response are necessarily a matter of coalition
between neural activity and an intricate network of peripheral nervous system
pathways that stretch all over our bodies” (Damasio and Meyer 168). The “4Es” view
posits the mind to be embodied, embedded, enactive and extended (Johnson; Wheeler;
Gallagher and Zahavi; Menary; Colombetti; Rowlands). Holistic views of cognition
stretch back, of course, beyond Aristotle, and folktales themselves reveal that the
tellers of folktales were, centuries ago, keenly aware of the centrality of bodily
sensations to human understanding. This awareness has been interwoven into their
very structures. Sociopolitical, geographic and religious specificities produce different
conceptual frameworks in different tales. But in this they all cohere: they excite the
senses, and call for close attention to bodily phenomena as a means of exploring
emotions, mental states and moral preferences.
In this, fairly tales also accord with recent research that demonstrates how
certain forms of reception and perception are innate, involuntary, and physical: they
can occur without ever surfacing to consciousness (Damasio). Nonetheless,
interpretation of such “embodied” activity requires conscious attention (Heidegger
termed this “attuned understanding” 240). This is because denial, repression and
confabulation are often more salient than the physical evidence of emotion. In other
words, “attunement” to one’s own body, and to the bodies of others, is a skill that has
to be learned. The theoretical challenge is, then, to describe how this learned
attunement interlaces with preconscious motor resonances. Before I proceed to do so,
it is important to recognize – and this is crucial to the argument that follows – that
attunement of this kind requires narrativization to become fully meaningful and
integrated into a person’s worldview. To make sense of events, we have to be able to
tell ourselves a story which includes causal connections, and this use of
narrativization is not automatically available to us – it requires centuries of cultural
knowhow. How then may we come by this knowhow? One excellent place to start is
by engaging with fairy tales, because fairy tales combine two registers of
communication: they stimulate the physical resonance made possible by our
embodied cognitive infrastructure, further discussed below, and they combine this
with socially and culturally mediated knowhow.
I propose to begin by looking at developmental studies, which show three
stages in the acquisition of inter-personal understanding: (1) primary intersubjective
competence (Trevarthen) – a capacity in place by 18 months, by which we perceive
the intentions and feelings of others in their movements, gestures, and actions; (2)
secondary intersubjectivity, which is socially and pragmatically contextualized and
develops by the age 3 or 4 (Gallagher 14); and (3) “Narrative competency,” which
builds upon and extends both primary and secondary intersubjectivity, gradually
allowing us to recognize other people’s circumstances, and to “construct an
appropriately nuanced narrative understanding” (Gallagher 21). This “narrative
competency,” as storytellers and literary critics know well, is then enhanced and
refined throughout our lives via engagement with fictions just as much as via real-life
experiences. It gradually contributes to the inferential, interpretive competence some
call “folk psychology,” by which we make sense of other people’s actions, feeling and
mental states. As a child’s brain develops, it is fed, as philosopher Daniel Hutto
asserts, by the sociocultural context that bolsters the brain’s capacity into a locally
successful competence. Hutto claims that:

22
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

. . . [We] come by the requisite framework for such understanding and

master its practical application by being exposed to and engaging in . . .
direct encounters with stories about persons who act for reasons. . . . [thus
becoming] familiar with both (1) the basic structure of folk psychology and
(2) the norm-governed possibilities for wielding it in practice, thus learning
both how and when to use it. (Hutto xi)

Fairytales are prime examples of “stories about persons who act for reasons.” Because
these tales trace and work through psychological, social, and spiritual dimensions of
human existence they provide concrete examples growing children need in order to
understand the actions of adults within their community. They also help us to
reconstruct the way fiction functioned as a social resource before the discipline of
psychology was developed, not least because these folk-psychological-narratives
assume that learning, and certainly learning from stories, is a social practice.
How are we initiated into this practice? The hermeneutic role of
readers/listeners has been described by Mikhail Bakhtin as a dialogue with the text, by
Wolfgang Iser as an interaction, and by Louis Rosenblatt as a transaction; it draws
upon various interpretative frameworks, including “anticipatory, narrative,
hermeneutic, semic, symbolic and referential” codes (Nikolajeva 145). Shakespeare
famously thought that we can “By indirections find directions out” (Hamlet II.5) and
Kierkegaard favoured the “indirect mode” as a means of stimulating readers to think
and feel for themselves, rather than merely accept instruction from above (247). In
recent years, cognitive psychologists have devised experiments to confirm that literary
fiction improves readers’ understanding of other minds and of complex social
interactions, and even invites changes in readers’ personalities (Djikic et al.; Djikic
and Oatley; Oatley and Djikic; Richter et al.). Literary fiction is understood to
function as a “simulation of selves in interaction” (Oatley 618) and, as such, improves
readers’ empathy, social skills and emotional complexity (Kidd and Castano; Bal and
Veltkamp; Black and Barnes).
Cognitive literary criticism investigates further the modalities of this dialogic
interaction (Richardson and Spolsky; Zunshine). A semiotic account of a tale would
stress its conventionalized “codes” (Eco). A narratological discourse analysis
approach (Stockwell; Hermann) would study the devices that aid and guide readers’
interpretive scope, ascertained by constructing and integrating mental models based
upon “everyday probabilities, cultural preconceptions, and generic models readers
bring to the text” (Kukkonen 27), and setting “the wheels of meaning making in
motion” (27) by comparing, contrasting, rejecting and revising the contingent models
arising from engagement with the text and its features. Developing her training in
narratology to form a “cognitive narratology” account of fairy tales, Karin Kukkonen
has examined the inferential affordances of some postmodern fairy tales. Some of the
inferential processes they invite are, she acknowledges, swift and “largely
preconscious” (27) and are often assisted by previously ingested “schema” (28) or
memory structures, such as recognizable character prototypes (evil witch, innocent
maiden, ignorant father), and “iconographic markers” (Cinderella's shoes, the Snow
Queen’s icicles, a witch’s hat), recognizable narrative styles, and even familiar
illustration styles, all of which recall “popular cultural memory” associated with the
traditional genre (55) and features of a “shared symbolic reservoir” (58). On
Kukkonen’s model, the reader is likened to a detective reading for clues (30), and

23
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

great emphasis is placed upon readers’ logical problem-solving skills and conscious
mental work.
There still remains the task of assessing the extent to which this mental work is
influenced by manipulations that may well remain unconscious, even when readers
consciously strive to evaluate what Kukonnen calls “the propositional and emotional
inferences drawn during the reading processes ” (31). Clearly, the cultural, historical
and personal contexts that inform each reader’s interpretive toolkit are germane to any
literary engagement. And yet, much of this toolkit is deployed only after the initial
impact of bodily affect. In fact, Daniel Dennett argues that our brains are “probably
composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that
don’t have to comprehend what they are doing” (175). Like the acquisition of
language, which is gradual, so consciousness itself is learned. Dennet holds that the
infant (or fetus) is not formed equipped with consciousness but, rather, develops it
along with a suite of other talents which evolve over time; and this happens as the
human agent “gradually gets occupied by thousands of memes – not just words – that
(re)organize the neural connections on which these talents depend” (Dennett 192).
This suggests that the bodily registers of the text are of fundamental importance to
any interpretation – yet these have only very recently become a focus of increased
academic investigation. My analysis of fairy tales thus goes beyond, or perhaps
beneath, previous analyses, as it uncovers how susceptible mental models are to
physical suggestion.
Many thinkers are averse to questioning the autonomy of the reader in his/her
creative approach to the detective work of reading fiction and reality. That is why
Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have garnered so much adamant and often
venomous opposition. But the more scientists and humanities scholars collaborate, the
more evidence accumulates to support the meme hypothesis (which I discuss below)
and point to largely-unconscious aspects of the evolution of culture. This does not
mean humans are merely automations. It means that scholars would be wise to study
carefully evidence of the dynamics by which humans process information and reach
conclusions, without assuming these processes must necessarily be governed by
conscious choices. Kukkonen does look at bodily features in the texts she discusses,
such as gestures and facial expressions that are visually represented in comic-strips,
and suggests how these may both contribute to the construction of mental models of
the storyworld and of the mental states of the characters, informing readers’
“reasoning and coming to decisions” (50). She does not, however, concern herself
with the bodily mechanisms that precede the recognition or interpretation of such
representations of physical bodies, nor with the possible implications of the largely
preconscious bases for much decision-making. My argument here is that alongside –
and not always commensurate with – these reasoning processes, occur a host of
affective bodily resonances with distinguishable effects that largely direct the course
of later conscious reasoning. These will receive detailed attention in the next section.
Although Zipes’s analysis is also largely sociocultural and thematic, he adopts
an evolutionary stance that differs from Kukkonen’s, through creating links with
Dawkins’s view that many cultural issues are transferred via “memes.” Dawkins holds
that replication is the most fundamental drive of any biological organism, even the
single molecule, and that memes are the equivalent structure to genes when it comes
to the transmission of cultural content:

Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically or

technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally

24
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

parasitise my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in

just the way that a virus may parasitise the genetic mechanism of a host
cell. (Dawkins 192)

Fairy tales, claims Zipes, “often take the form of a meme in our brains, as the input of
a public representation, or replicator, and we process it in a module and transmit it in
a sociocultural context” (How Fairy Tales xiv). Zipes insists further that “a meme
must be made relevant to stick” (7), a claim Kukkonen reinforces by citing Jan
Assmann’s cultural memory theory, which emphasizes the crucial role of Habermas’s
notion of “contexts of relevance,” and she ties this briefly to “cognitive
environments.” Interestingly, Kukkonen does not find Dawkins’s memetics helpful to
her analysis as, she explains, she is interested in the agency of authors and publishers
as disseminators of culture (194).
Picking up where Kukkonen and Zipes leave off, I find Dawkins and Dennett
can help us to trace the pathways by which this agency is qualified, and examine the
extent to which we are able to choose our beliefs, or even become sufficiently aware
of them in order to choose. It is time to ask: what would be the equivalent of a healthy
cultural immune system, which filters potential colonization or parasitization by
viruses and by memes over which we have very little control? Zipes finds a
moderating gauge, as it were, in Jean-Michel Adam and Ute Heidmann’s theory of
généricité (genericity). Just as genes cannot function alone and require the
cooperation of other genes and myriad other enabling conditions and exchanges, so
the “discursive frame and reading interpretation” of any generic category is a
“complex process” of “socio-cognitive necessity” that relates texts, contexts and
social formations (Adam and Heidmann 62, cited in Zipes, Why Fairy Tales 24).
Although they do not acknowledge this, it is encouraging to note that this argument
comes close to Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein and Mitsein, which contributed to
current 4E views (explored at length in Gallagher, Morgan, Rokotnitz).
Having laid the groundwork, I turn in the next section to the variety of means
by which fairy tales communicate and manipulate knowledge through descriptions of
bodily movements that anchor ideational content in readers’/listeners’ bodies, making
the texts’ (abstract) motifs quite literally tangible. Underpinning my analysis is recent
evidence that comprehension of linguistic material stimulates somatotopic activation
in the premotor cortex. This means that the same neural circuits recruited for action
and emotion recognition are also activated when we engage with language, although
not necessarily in an identical fashion (Barsalau and Weimar-Hastings; Gallese and
Lakoff). This activation has been shown to occur both while reading (Hauk et al.) and
while listening (Tettamanti et al.) to descriptions of actions, and is all the more
pronounced when a concrete action verb is combined with a noun denoting a
graspable object (Marino et al.). Interestingly, activation occurs only when an explicit
semantic representation is required by the task at hand (Sato et al.). The object or
movement in question is always perceived (or imagined) in the context in which it
appears (in life or the text), and is thus, necessarily, interpreted in relation to that
context; that is, it is situated. Note also that such levels of excitation do not seem to be
engaged in processing the meaning of behaviours that are not part and cannot be part
of human sensorimotor repertoire (Buccino et al.), although other imaginative
capacities are called into play (like flying, for instance). This form of “motor
resonance” seems to be responsible for understanding the goal of an action (Zwaan
and Taylor 1) and contributes to interpretation of its meaning by stimulating the
observer’s own motor programmes (8). In what follows, I suggest how this is likely to

25
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

influence readers’/listeners’ engagement with fairy tales such as “Snow White,”

whose multilayered richness is exemplary of the genre.

Representing and Inducing Motor Actions as a Learning-Aid: “Snow White”

A cognitive-literary analysis of multiple variants of “Snow White” highlights a
salience of motor-imagery that is not specific to a particular translation of a variant
tale but, rather, is revealed to be an underlying methodological principle of the fairy
tale genre. As Maria Tatar has documented, hundreds of versions of the “Snow White
type tale” (Aarne-Thompson type 709) have been collected throughout Europe, Asia,
Africa and the Americas. The Grimm Brothers’ version of the story is the one most
people already know.1 In it, Snow White confronts many hardships and learns thereby
to contain some of her impulses while fostering others; to rely on herself and yet also
seek assistance; to value herself and those about her who deserve her affections (due
to their honorable behaviour); and to integrate within her community as a productive
member of society. All these elements are recurring themes in the majority of
European fairytales, and are encoded in a variety of textual effects that teach the
archetypal theme of learning how to learn. In “Snow White” these include, for
instance, a deconstructing of the good/evil dichotomy: although Snow White’s dead
mother provides a kind of role-model of industrious, gentle, caregiving, it is,
ironically, the step-mother-queen-witch who – by default – acts as the primary
teacher. Her evil is instructive, encouraging readers/listeners to refine their critical
faculties: attending to detail, validating sources, seeking and weighing up evidence,
sifting information and questioning. Another recurring feature of the genre is that the
protagonist learns from experiential trial and error. In the case of “Snow White,” she
is guided by the dwarves and saved by them, time and again, from her own mistakes.
But the dwarves do not explicitly teach how to behave – only how not to behave.
Similarly, as the tale is not framed by a narrator-persona, it never states openly what it
teaches. It mostly describes events, and the characters’ responses to them, without
intervention or comment. Both characters and readers must therefore learn despite –
and due to – experiencing difficulties. Readers/listeners thus practice and hone their
folk-psychology skills, learning to differentiate good from bad inferences, not by
referring to an external set of pre-given precepts but by seeing the effects of actions in
context.
The embodied dimensions of the tale play a leading role in this context. All
fairy tales are packed with symbolic referents that a young child or a foreigner, even if
fully proficient in reading the language of the tale, would still be underequipped to
unpack without the assistance of an adult mediator who is versed in that specific
symbolic landscape. However, the gist of the tale and much of its moral teaching can
be decoded via the primary, secondary, and narrative skills described above. Such
decoding, I propose, is greatly assisted by the way the tales couch socially and
culturally mediated knowhow in descriptions of basic motor-actions. For instance,
when Snow White is left alone, she is given one prohibitive guideline: “Beware of
your step-mother, she will soon know you are here. Let no one into the house” (Tatar
86). Poor child, however, she becomes bored. She does not articulate this
dissatisfaction to herself until temptation, quite literally, appears at the door, in the
form of the evil-queen disguised as “an old peddler woman” who:

knocked at the door and called out, “Pretty wares for a good price. ”
Snow-white peeked out of the window and said, “Good-day, old
woman, what do you have for sale?”

26
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

“Nice things, pretty things,” she replied, “staylaces in all kinds of all
colors”; and she took out a silk lace woven of many colors. (86)

As my bold-font indicates, this passage instantiates the importance of motor-

resonance in conveying the moral agenda of the story. I will proceed to draw out
seven strategies for instruction this dynamic affords reader/listeners (and in the next
section connect them to an eighth).
Instructive Strategy #1 - motor-imagery: experiments show that people glean
meaning more readily from actions than from mental terms. Subjects tested for
reading comprehension showed “no significant differences” in comprehension
between texts listing action-sequences and texts rich in descriptive mental-referents
(Gallagher 19). However, while folk-psychological vocabulary proves dispensable for
basic narrative understanding, “affective resonance (as represented in expressive
movements and gestures)” is essential for “empathic understanding” (19). Indeed,
psychologist Susan Goldin Meadow and her colleagues have shown that gestures both
enhance and alter our thinking: either supporting linguistic communication or
qualifying it, depending on usage (Goldin Meadow; Goldin Meadow and Wagner).
Anežka Kuzmičová has found that it is the evocation of human bodily movement,
rather than description of the scene, that arouses in the reader/listener “a sense of
having physically entered a tangible environment (presence) ” (“Presence” 24). This
suggests why every stage of “Snow White” is anchored in concrete bodily actions,
described and acted out in clearly indicated environments: “she knocked at the door;”
“peeked out of the window;” “took out” the silk. Knocking at the door provides a
particularly potent example of what Kuzmičová terms a “presence cue” (35), by
replicating the experience of motor interaction. Such cues invite motor-resonance:
they can cause the activation of the same motor circuits the reader/listener would use
in order to perform the same action, in this case reaching out and tapping on the door
and also opening it. The text thus co-opts our shared motor schema. We not only read,
think and imagine: we physically participate in the tale's action; it thus becomes a
form of lived experience.
Instruction Strategy #2 - specific reference to touch: this strategy further
links the body to its environment, and bridges the gap between words and experiential
involvement, making the tale’s teachings tangible. Indeed, experiments indicate that
“human observers understand objects touching other objects in terms of being touched
themselves” (Zwaan and Taylor 9), further enhancing readers’/listeners’ motor
resonance. The narrative continues:

“I can let this good woman in,” Snow White thought to herself, and
she unbolted the door and bought the pretty lace.
“Oh my child, what a sight you are. Come let me lace you up
properly.”
Snow White wasn’t the least bit suspicious. She stood in front of the
old woman and let her put on the new lace. The old woman laced her up
so quickly and so tightly that Snow White's breath was cut off, and she fell
down as if dead. (86)

Instruction Strategy #3 - there is almost no description of the lace, its

texture, length or colour. The absence of detail can be explained as a device that
allows readers to relate the tale to their own experiences. But it also coheres with
studies that indicate that the “more elaborate a static description of an object, the

27
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

higher the ‘risk’ of conceptualization and defamiliarization” (Kuzmičová, “Presence”

40). For maximum immediate effect we must know less about the lace and more about
its handling. This is not to say, of course, that descriptive forms of literary production
are inferior, or that complex uses of language in literature should be dismissed. Not at
all. Moreover, not all literary forms have the same goal. What this strategy does
indicate is that fairy tales, a genre of storytelling whose chief purpose is to impart
cultural and moral instruction, utilize affective manipulation in order to arrest
audiences’ attentions and stimulate motor resonance as a means of galvanizing
support for the moral agenda of the tale.
Instruction Strategy #4 - surprise: the intensity of the tale is increased further
by the quality of suddenness, which jolts readers/listeners into attention. Expectations
(based on our repertoire of past experiences, as well as that of our ancestors encoded
in our DNA) lead us to make predictive probabilistic guesses (Bayesian hierarchical
predictive coding, see Clark, Supersizing; and Dennett). This hard-wiring to anticipate
and prepare for eventualities is often crucial in saving time and effort. It is also
sometimes wrong – hence the impact of surprise (Currie; Bae and Young; Tobin). In
“Snow White,” the protagonist shifts from a relaxed state, looking out of the window
and handling soft silk, to suddenly experiencing breathlessness. This alarming
situation elicits readers’ sympathy by combining an emotionally-valenced plot with
physical prompts that elicit surprise.
Instruction Strategy #5 - agitating affective schema: engaging with Snow
White's experience of suffocation and panic also activates our respiratory circuitry
and other panic-related affective schema. Most readers/listeners over the age of three
will, at this point, experience distress. In addition to the multifold significances of this
narrative episode, which a mediator – a village elder, a knowing parent, a folklorist or
university professor – may aid us in analyzing, this physical excitation also speaks for
itself. It is a very effective means of teaching young children about “stranger danger,”
of alerting older children to the need to be circumspect, and of reminding adults to be
vigilant. Readers are at liberty to adopt or object to this attitude, of course, but it is
nonetheless communicated directly.
Instruction Strategy #6 - emotions in these tales are almost always couched
in physical responses. For instance, when the witch discovers Snow White is still
alive, “the blood froze in her veins” (Tatar 87), “she was so struck with surprise that
all the blood left her heart.” The surprise is located in her body. Moreover,
psychologists have shown that “visceral perception plays a role in the experience of
the intensity of emotions” (Wiens, Mezzacappa, and Katkin 147) and, specifically,
awareness of one’s own heart-activity is positively correlated with the intensity of
emotional experience (Caracciolo 64). Calling attention to the queen’s heart further
heightens the emotional impact of this episode. Thus, in addition to the repetition of
key phrases, recurring leitmotifs, and iconic symbols, the text directly accesses the
readers’ bodies, forcing us to take note.
Snow White’s next temptation is a comb, and the final one is an apple. Rich in
biblical connotations of disobedience, sexuality, knowledge and evil, the episode
arrests readers by a mouthwatering description of an appetizing fruit:

“Are you afraid it is poisoned?” asked the old woman, “Here, I’ll cut the
apple in two. You eat the red part, I’ll eat the white.”
The apple had been made so artfully, that only the red part of it was
poison. Snow White felt a craving for the beautiful apple, and when she
saw the peasant woman was eating it, she could no longer resist. She put

28
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

her hand out the window took the poisoned half. But no sooner had she
taken a bite when she fell down to the ground dead. (Tatar 88)

Instruction Strategy #7 - a multimodal cue. It is not by chance that the

symbolic interpretive possibilities of the text are presented to readers/listeners via
motor-movements inducing eye-hand-mouth pathways, and vivid colours that excite
our aesthetic sense and our taste-buds. These are the “embodied anchors” by which
the abstract moral codes of the tale are made tangible. I have, in a previous article,
examined in detail how these anchors function both as metaphors and as physical cues
that activate readers’ preconscious modes of perception, modify cognitive skills and
intensify the effects of reading, potentially facilitating profound learning (Rokotnitz
“Goosebumps”). In this context, readers/listeners of “Snow White” may (to varying
degrees) tease out the metaphoric implications of her fall; but even an uninitiated
reader immediately registers its sensorimotor impact: we know this is bad. The tale
thus stirs, excites, and motivates. The morality conveyed is one of complex,
multimodal, interactive learning, rather than top-down imparting of information. It is
therefore fundamentally empowering to readers/listeners (despite well-founded
criticism of the Grimm Brothers’ attitudes to women). Nonetheless, in the next section
I explore other variants of the tale, and suggest how they foreground a key instruction
tool which the Grimm Brothers’ version only mentions briefly.

“The Young Slave” Variant, Expressing Experience in Words, and Testimonial

Narratives
“The Young Slave” variant of the Snow White type tale emphasizes a further
instructional dynamic. It is the earliest recorded variant, found in the writings of the
Napolitan Giambattista Basile in 1634, and also features elements of the “Sleeping
Beauty” (Aarne-Thompson tale-type 410), “Vassilisa the Beautiful” (type 531), and
“Blue Beard” (type 312) tales. It begins with a game of leapfrog; a competition
between young girls to jump clean over a rose. Lilla, known first as “the Baron’s
sister,” wins the competition by showing physical dexterity, speedy reactions, and
some dishonesty:

. . . she stood back a little and took such a run at it that she jumped right
over to the other side of the rose. Nevertheless, one leaf fell, but she was so
quick and ready that she picked it up from the ground without anyone
noticing and swallowed it, thereby winning the prize. (Tatar 80)

The symbolism is rich and it is not surprising that Lilla finds the leaf has impregnated
her. In hiding, she gives birth to “a lovely little girl” whom she names Lisa (80). Due
to a curse, at the age of seven Lisa falls dead, or so it seems, while her mother is
combing her hair. She is encased in a glass coffin. However, although the mother dies
soon after, Lisa continues to grow and becomes a beautiful – if unconscious – young
woman, kept safe in a secret chamber in the Baron’s castle. When the Baron's jealous
wife finds “this lovely creature” she:

seized the girl by the hair, dragged her out, and in so doing caused the comb
to drop out, so that the sleeping Lisa awoke, calling out, “Mother, mother!”
“I’ll give you mother, and father too!” cried the Baroness, who was
as bitter as a slave, as angry as a bitch with a litter of pups, and as
venomous as a snake. She straight away cut off the girl’s hair and thrashed

29
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

her with the tresses, dressed her in rags and every day heaped blows on her
head and bruises on her face, blackening her eyes and making her mouth
look as if she had eaten raw pigeons. (Tatar 81)

This passage further demonstrates the strategies enumerated earlier: it foregrounds

motor-actions to express complex emotions – Strategy #1; it repeatedly refers to touch
– Strategy #2. It uses similes to encourage understanding, but very little description –
Strategy #3 – thus evoking generic dogs and pups, and generic snakes, but offering no
details that individuate such animals, nor any description of Lisa’s tresses, except that
they were cut off, a violent act of abuse. The text thus agitates affective schema –
Strategies #5 and #6. There is also particular focus on the girl's head, face and eyes,
highlighting specific body-parts, thereby directing readers’ attentions to our shared
physiologies. In this case, the effect of the abuse is supposed to stun the maiden’s
ability to think (head) and see (eyes), and also prevents her from being able to present
herself to others (face) as she really is: innocent and beautiful beneath the bruises.
And yet, while this abuse disrupts the synchrony between Lisa’s inner truth and its
outer show, exemplifying the deconstruction of good and evil, the evil baroness’
violence is instructive – like the evil witch’s. Although her violence is presented as
wrongful in no uncertain terms, it also forces Lisa out of sleep (or complacency, or
passivity) and contributes to her coming-into-agency. Moreover, Lisa exhibits
resourcefulness in response to these injustices, and triumphs over her abuser through
her own cleverness. This process of self-affirmation is relayed to readers/listeners as
an example of conduct worth emulating.
All these bodily effects, however, must somehow be integrated into the
character’s and reader’s self-understanding, if they are to contribute to positive
change. The act of converting sensation and emotions into words allows one to create
a narrative that organizes “the emotional effects ” of experience as well as the
experience itself (Pennebaker 11). Pierre Janet already argued that traumatic memory
may be overcome through narrative memory and, still today, treatment of PTSD
includes guiding survivors towards an expression of themselves in a narrative. Hence,
working through trauma has been defined by Dominick LaCapra as an articulatory
practice (42). In particular, a testimonial narrative that describes traumatic events
causes events to be “reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally
worked over” (Felman and Laub xv). Transmitting the story of experience offloads
some of its weight, and also entails “a reassertion of the hegemony of reality and a re-
externalization of the evil that affected and constrained the trauma victim” (Felman
and Laub 69). Stanley Cavell once wrote that telling denotes “reconceiving,
reconstituting knowledge, along with the world” (204). Felman and Laub contend that
to testify is to accomplish a speech-act. “As a performative speech-act, testimony in
effect addresses what in history is action that exceeds any substantialized
significance” (Felman and Laub 5; see Rokotnitz, “Dignity”). “The Young Slave”
foregrounds this important instruction strategy.
Instruction Strategy #8 - telling her life-story: it is her recounting of her sad
tale (to a doll) that allows the Baron to overhear the truth of Lisa’s experience. He, in
turn, makes Lisa tell him “the story again at greater length” (Tatar 82) and is thereby
not only convinced but spurred to act in her defense. Kay Young and Jeffery Saver
maintain that “what predominates or fundamentally constitutes our consciousness is
the understanding of self and world in story” (Young and Saver 73); and Roger
Schank claims that “intelligence is bound up with our ability to tell the right story at
the right time” (21). This is precisely what Lisa teaches readers. In the final episode of

30
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

the tale, Lisa tells her story for the third time, this time to the entire household,
causing them to weep in sympathy for her, as the wicked baroness is driven from the
palace “back to her parents” (an interesting punishment), while Lisa receives “a
handsome husband of her own choice” (83).2
In the Brothers Grimm version, Snow White is spared by the hunter because she
is “so beautiful” (Tatar 84), not because she has managed to convey to him the
injustice of her situation. When she weeps he takes pity on her, but he expects that
“wild animals will devour” her soon after. He seems mostly motivated to clear his
own conscience, feeling “a great weight had been lifted from his heart” (84) when he
leaves her to fend for herself in the forest. The dwarves also take pity on her primarily
due to her beauty (85). Snow White does articulate her tale for them but her words are
not relayed to readers. In response to recounting “how her stepmother had tried to kill
her and that the huntsman had spared her life” (85) the dwarves take her in, on the
condition that she acts as housemaid, agreeing to forfeit her noble lineage in order to
“cook, make beds, wash, sew, knit and keep everything neat and tidy” (85). In
exchange they give her what they deem to be “everything you need” (85). They do
not, however, either try – or encourage her to try – to clear her name and be
vindicated. Snow White, for her part, acquiesces humbly, gratefully. The attitude the
Grimm Brothers thereby aim to teach their readers/listeners has been criticized in the
latter part of the twentieth century as reflecting their patriarchal values, rather than
those of the folktale traditions (Gilbert and Gubar; Zipes, The Art; Swann Jones).
In marked contrast, Lisa’s storytelling in “The Young Slave,” follows folktale
lore by empowering her and the readers. It exhibits the level of awareness Stanley
Cavell marks as the transition from knowing to acknowledging: expressing one’s
understanding through “the willingness to subject oneself to words, to make oneself
intelligible” (4). This observation prefigures Dennett’s claim that many experiences
can remain unconscious, and even consciousness does not require comprehension in
order to develop. And yet, for comprehension to develop, we often require memes
(words, concepts, whole belief systems): these are “the lifeblood of cultural
evolution” (Dennett 179). In “The Young Slave,” Lisa’s conscious engagement with
her predicament, and its formulation into a testimonial narrative, effect what Andy
Clark terms “a mode of cognition-enhancing self-stimulation” (“Language” 370),
reflecting her maturation: her ability to knowingly engage with her “own thoughts,
trains of reasoning, and personal cognitive character” (372). She also demonstrates
refined intersubjective competence: first by using narrative skills to articulate herself,
and then by presenting them, with increasing finesse, to those who may assist her and
advance her cause. The story thereby demonstrates just how acknowledgment of the
productive interplay between embodied receptiveness and analytical, linguistic
assessment create the possibility for knowledge that is “good enough” (a term Cavell
borrows from Winnicott; see Spolsky, Satisfying 45).3 Indeed, it coheres with Lakoff
and Johnson’s assertion that truth is “experiential” (175). As Johnson later remarked:
while there is no one Truth yet there are “plenty of human truths,” meaning
knowledge that arises from the context of human embodied interaction. “Finite,
fallible, human truth is all the truth that we have, and all we need” (Johnson, The
Meaning 80).
There is a great deal more to be said about this variant of the “Snow White“ tale
but, for the purposes of the present argument, I am focusing upon the salience of two
important narrative-features and the strategies through which these are conveyed:
descriptions of motor actions and the thematization of storytelling.

31
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

The “Lasair Gheug” and “Gold Tree and Silver Tree” Variants, and The Theme
of Assuming Control of One’s Life Story
“Lasair Gheug, The King of Ireland’s Daughter” is actually a Scottish variant printed
in 1891.4 It includes elements of the “Handless Maiden” (type 706; in this case, the
father mutilating his own child by cutting off the ends of her fingers), and introduces
into the plot a second wife. In this tale, the evil queen is the mother (not step mother)
of Lasair Gheug – or Flaming Branches. She is poisoned by the queen after she weds
the Prince, and it is the Prince who encases her in a coffin (of lead) and keeps her in a
secret chamber. Presuming she is dead, the Prince remarries, but remains mournful.
The Prince’s second wife, Lasair Gheug’s successor, discovers her, and it is she who
recognizes the three splinters that caused the young queen’s slumber. The second
wife, significantly left unnamed, is the one who brings Lasair Gheug back to
consciousness and to her rightful place aside the king, which the two wives decide to
share.
So as to continue to focus upon motor actions and storytelling, I will
concentrate upon the passage in the story in which Lasair Gheug insists on telling her
tale, while actively performing a series of self-directed, meaningful actions. She does
this on a Sunday, in a church, while riding a wild boar so as to circumvent the oath
forced out of her in her youth by the evil queen. In addition to the many symbolic
registers of this act, its brisk action-oriented descriptions are markedly conspicuous:

She got the wild boar; she got onto the boar’s back; went in at one door of
the church and out the other door. She called her three unchristened
children to her side.
“I am not going to tell my story to anyone at all,” said she, “but to
you three unchristened children.” (Tartar 95)

She defiantly recounts the violent tale of killings and lucky escapes, at the end of
which she explains: “they expected that my father would kill me, but he has not killed
me yet” (Tatar 95). The tale, in exactly the same words, accompanied by exactly the
same actions, is then repeated three times, once for each child, after which the boar is
set free. Immediately after that, the evil queen arrives at the church, but she is caught
“and burned in the fire” (95). Unceremoniously, we are not even told exactly by
whom. The point is that, once Lasair Gheug is sure of her right to tell her tale, to pass
it on, to own its meaning and to break the bonds to the queen, that queen is easily
disposed of, while the father-King is wed to a new wife, a friend of his daughter. And
that daughter lives happily ever after with the Prince and his second wife, her dearest
companion.
Finally, I wish to look briefly at another nineteenth century Scottish variant,
recorded by Joseph Jacobs in 1892, entitled “Gold Tree and Silver Tree.” This tale is
very similar in structure to “Lasair Gheug,” yet includes less violence against the
Snow White character, and gives even greater autonomy, initiative, and successful
cooperation and compassion to the two wives – joint vanquishers of despotic evil.5
This tale further foregrounds, more than any other variant, the power of cooperative
action – of shared agency. The final passage of this tale will suffice for the present
purposes. Silver Tree, the jealous queen, arrives in her husband’s longboat, hoping to
poison Gold Tree, her daughter. The Prince is conveniently away:

The prince was out hunting on the hills. Gold Tree knew her father’s ship
coming.

32
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

“Oh!” said she, “my mother is coming, and she will kill me.”
“Not at all,” said the second wife; “we will go down to meet her.”
Silver-Tree came ashore. “Come down, Gold Tree, love,” said she,
“for your own mother has come to you with a precious drink.”
“It is a custom in this country,” said the second wife, “that the
person who offers a drink takes a draught out of it first.”
Silver-Tree put her mouth to it, and the second wife went and struck
it so that some of it went down her throat, and she fell dead. They had only
to carry her home a dead corpse and bury her.
The prince and his two wives were long alive after this, pleased and
peaceful.
I left them there.

Once again, all the eight strategies I have enumerated are co-present in the tale,
including the protagonist articulating her story and relating it to others who help her.
In addition, a further metafictional element is added at the end, by which the
storyteller steps away from the tale and its protagonists, and reminds us that
storytelling is part of an oral tradition of cultural transmission. This variant thus
accentuates the importance of the art of telling tales – personal and cultural, real and
fictional.

Conclusions
Ellen Spolsky has recently argued that it is “not the truth or falsehood of stories but
their availability to transformation between abstract ideas and concrete representations
that determines their usefulness. . . . on the condition, of course, that we learn how to
use them” (The Contracts 18). In this article, I have set out a number of strategies for
doing just that. My main focus has been the use of motor-imagery, and the
thematization of storytelling: two different registers of engagement with cultural texts.
The one is unconscious and involuntary, the other conscious, active, and empowering.
The interplay between these two (and other) modes of perception and processing is
continual – in life, as in reading. The analysis I have offered here, which observes
closely how this dynamic is worked out in fairy tales (and extends in interesting ways
to other forms of narrative production such as life-stories and testimonies) suggests a
number of conclusions, some of which are not new yet have received important
confirmation or substantiation, others are quite novel, and all contribute to the moral
instruction the genre affords.
First, narratives allow readers/listeners to engage with scenarios, characters,
theories and dilemmas to which we would not necessarily otherwise be exposed. But
the value of this exposure is not merely in the broadening of our horizons but in the
active participation it instigates. This is aided by the motor-resonance stimulated by
the tale. The accessibility, popularity, and continuing moral value of fairy tales can
thus be accounted for, at least in part, by emphasizing the ways in which they elicit
and refine our attunement to the bodily forms of interaction that prove to be effective
means of communicating their folk-psychological wisdom. Second, stories teach of
choice. Different traditions and authors have framed this choice in differing ways but
the theme is inherent to the practice. Tales thus motivate us to act; they do not only
“speak out against passivity and exploitation” (Zipes, The Art xiii) but enlist us to
active response. Indeed, fairy tales, specifically, do not provide clear-cut solutions.
Their primary moral value lies in displaying and then suggesting means for
negotiating difficulties.

33
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

A further moral value of fairy tales is expressed by demonstrating that learning

is a social skill: isolation perpetuates ignorance; knowledge is gained by interaction
with other people and the stories they tell. Indeed, learning to tell our personal tale
effectively so that others hear and believe it is an essential, sometimes lifesaving,
skill. We find value in learning through stories not only in the tales themselves but in
the social mediums of their telling and re-telling. The means by which the stories have
been transmitted, recycled and redeployed, enact the very precepts the stories
themselves thematize regarding storytelling and social learning. In particular, the
continuously successful tradition of fairy tales instantiates the natural human
predisposition, honed by evolutionary advantage, of cultivating reciprocal
interchange. Biology and culture, nature and nurture, work in tandem. From the
smallest of genes to the grandest of memes, coalition and cooperation turn out to be
our most valuable and most effective inheritance.
The perspective of cognitive literary analysis and the evidence presented here
take readers/listeners beyond ourselves into the realm of the extended, embedded,
enactive mind and its embodied and shared interactions. Agency is thus reformulated:
not as a task an individual can pursue alone but, rather, as the evolving, dynamic
product of shared action-into-the-world. This suggests that the basis for moral
comportment ought then to be – above any other consideration – focused upon the
best means of fostering and maintaining cooperative principles of reciprocity.

34
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

Notes

1. Although some renditions are more poetic, I have chosen to use Tatar's
scholarly translation.
2. This is a very progressive conclusion for its time, although the closing
moral is bizarre: “Heaven rains favors on us when we least expect it.” This issue is,
however, beyond the scope of the present paper.
3. Cavell claims, “it is possible to live an intelligent, satisfying, and even
moral life with the mental equipment which is our inheritance” and “recover . . . from
the tragically debilitating skepticism that rejects ‘good enough’ knowledge in a vain
struggle for an impossible ideal” (Spolsky, Satisfying 44–45).
4. Translated by Alan Bruford, narrated by Mrs. Macmillan, and recorded by
Lady Evelyn Stewart-Murray in 1891 in Tartar 90-96.
5. There are thousands of postmodern retellings of Snow White and other
fairytales. Aside from films that engage with the tale but, arguably, constitute a
different generic medium, both Zipes and Kukkonen show that postmodern narratives
of the tales are deliberately often testing alternate perspectives (such as Neil Gaiman's
“Snow, Glass, Apples” which is told from the point of view of the stepmother and
demonizes the daughter). These texts usually deliberately aim to deviate from the
familiar versions of the tales, or test aspects of human pathology, rather than aiming
to frame a story of initiation, maturation and integration as the older stories did. Of
course themes such as murderous jealousy were suggested by the ancient tales, but
they were in no way normalized. In contrast, Zipes discusses Tanith Lee's three
versions of the tale, “Red Blood“ (1983) which emphasizes “the raw brutality” of the
competition between stepmother and daughter; “Snow Drop” (1993), which is in
effect a different story that has intertextual connections with the fairy tale so as to
extend the theme of uncontrollable instinct and violence; and the novel White as Snow
(2000) which is just as much a take on the Persephone and Demeter myth (Zipes 136-
7). Kukkonen discusses the graphic novel series Fables (2002-2015), which
transposes fairy tale characters to contemporary New York. These are all valid literary
productions, and interesting contemporary social commentaries, but I hesitate to
consider them “versions” of the fairy tale. They are, I would argue, creative responses
to certain themes, and imaginative extensions of the tales that are far removed from
what might be imagined to be the oral folk tale from which “Snow White” emerged.
Moreover, they are extended narratives, some a few hundred pages long, and no
longer conform to the fable or fairy tale generic brevity. My analysis of the bodily
effects of reading can be extended to these texts – and I have shown that appeals to
readers’ bodies are, by definition, germane to any fiction that has human characters in
interaction (Rokotnitz, “Goosebumps”) – but for the purposes of this inquiry into fairy
tales specifically, I shall end this article with a final nineteenth century version.

35
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

Works Cited

Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales. Multilingual Folk Tale

Database. www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu. Accessed 10 Dec. 2018.
Bae, Byung-Chull, and R. Michael Young. “A Computational Model of Narrative
Generation for Surprise Arousal.” IEEE Transactions on Computational
Intelligence and AI in Games, vol. 6, no. 2, 2014, pp. 131-143.
Barsalou, Lawrence W., and Katja Wiemer-Hastings. “Situating Abstract Concepts.”
Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory,
Language, and Thought, edited by D. Pecher and R. Zwaan, Cambridge UP,
2005, pp. 129-163.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy
Tales. Penguin, 1976.
Buccino, G., et al. “Listening to Action-Related Sentences Modulates the Activity of
the Motor System: A Combined TMS and Behavioral Study.” Cognitive Brain
Research, vol. 24, no. 3, 2005, pp. 355-363.
Caracciolo, Marco. “Tell-Tale Rhythms: Embodiment and Narrative Discourse. ”
Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2014, pp. 49-73.
Caruso, Gregg, and Mark Flanagan, editors. Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals,
and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. Oxford UP, 2018.
Cavell, Stanley. Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge UP,
1987.
Clark, Andy. “Where Brain, Body and Mind Collide.” Daedalus, vol. 127, no. 2,
1998, pp. 247-280.
---. “Language, Embodiment, and the Cognitive Niche.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
vol. 10, no. 8, 2006, pp. 370-374.
---. Supersizing the Mind Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford UP,
2013.
Colombetti, Giovanna. The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind.
MIT P, 2014.
Currie, Mark. The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of
Surprise. Edinburgh UP, 2013.
Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making
of Consciousness. Harcourt, 1999.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 1976. 40th Anniversary ed., Oxford UP, 2016.
Dennett, Daniel C. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. W. W.
Norton, 2017.
Djikic, Maja and Oatley, Keith. “The Art in Fiction: From Indirect Communication to
Changes of the Self.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 8,
no. 4, 2014, pp. 498-505.
Djikic, Maja., Keith Oatley and Mathew Carland. “Genre or Artistic Merit: the Effect
of Literature on Personality.” Scientific Study of Literature, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012,
pp. 25-36.
Dworkin, Andrea. Women-Hating. Plume, 1991.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, M.D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Routledge, 1992.
Frus, Phyllis, and Christy Williams. Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical
Transformations of Original Works. McFarland & Co., 2010.
Gallagher, Shaun. “Neurons, Neonates and Narrative: From Embodied Resonance to
Empathic Understanding.” Moving Ourselves, Moving Others, edited by Ad

36
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

Foolen, Ulrike M. Lüdtke, Jordan Zlatev and Tim Racine, John Benjamins,
2012, pp. 167-96.
Gallagher, Shaun, and Daniel Hutto. “Understanding Others through Primary
Interaction and Narrative Practice.” The Shared Mind: Perspectives on
Intersubjectivity, edited by Jordan Zlatev, Timothy C. Racine, Chris Sinha and
Esa Itkonen, John Benjamins, 2008, pp. 17-38.
Gallagher, Shaun, Ben Morgan and Naomi Rokotnitz. “Relational Authenticity.”
Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of
Neuroscience, edited by Gregg Caruso and Owen Flanagan, Oxford UP, 2018,
pp. 126-146.
Gallese, Vittorio. “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to
Empathy.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 8, no. 5-7, 2001, pp. 33-50.
Gallese, Vittorio, and George Lakoff. “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the
Sensorimotor System in Conceptual Knowledge.” Cognitive Neuropsychology,
vol. 22, no. 3, 2005, pp. 455-479.
“Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree.” Library of Folktales, Folklore Fairytales and
Mythology, D. L. Ashliman, www.pitt.edu/~dash/ashliman.html. Accessed 5
Dec. 2018.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1980. Yale Nota
Bene, 2000.
Goldin Meadow, Susan. “Talking and Thinking With Our Hands.” Current Directions
in Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 1, 2006, pp. 34-39.
Goldin Meadow, Susan, and Martha Wagner. “Gesture’s Role in Speaking, Learning,
and Creating Language.” The Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 64, 2013, pp.
257-283.
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm. “Snow White.” The Classic Fairy Tales, translated by
Maria Tatar, Critical ed., W.W. Norton, 1999.
Hauk, Olaf, Ingrid Johnsrude and Friedemann Pulvermuller. “Somatotopic
Representation of Action Words in Human Motor and Premotor Cortex. ”
Neuron, vol. 41, no. 2, 2004, pp. 301-7.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, SUNY
Press, 1996.
Herman, David. Storytelling and the Science of the Mind. MIT Press, 2013.
Hosek, Jennifer Ruth, and Walter J. Freeman. “Osmetic Ontogenesis, or Olfaction
Becomes You: The Neurodynamic, Intentional Self and Its Affinities with the
Foucaultian/Butlerian Subject.” Configurations, vol. 9, 2001, pp. 509-541.
Hutto, Daniel. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of
Understanding Reasons. MIT Press, 2008.
Iser, Woflgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Johns Hopkins
UP, 1978.
Jacobs, Arthur M. “Neurocognitive Poetics: Methods and Models for Investigating the
Neuronal and Cognitive–Affective Bases of Literature Reception.” Frontiers
in Human Neuroscience, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 186-88.
Jeannerod, Marc. Motor Cognition: What Actions Tell the Self. Oxford UP, 2006.
Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. U of
Chicago P, 2007.
---. Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive
Science. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.

37
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

Kidd, D.C., and Castano, E. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.”
Science, vol. 342, no. 6156, 2013, pp. 377-380.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. 1846. Translated by D.F.
Swenson and W. Lowrie. Princeton UP, 1968.
Kirmayer, Laurence J. “Toward a Medicine of the Imagination.” New Literary
History, vol. 37, no. 3, 2006, pp. 583-601.
Kukkonen, Karin. Contemporary Comics Storytelling. U of Nebraska P, 2013.
Kuzmičová, Anežka. “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: A Case for
Motor Enactment.” Semiotica, vol. 189, no. 1-4, 2012, pp. 23-48.
---. “Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition. ”
Style, vol. 48, no. 3, 2014, pp. 275-93.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. U of Chicago P, 1980.
Lutterbie, John. Towards a Theory of Acting: Cognitive Science and Performance.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Lurie, Alison. “Fairy Tale Liberation.” The New York Review of Books. 1 Dec. 1970.
Marino, Barbara F.M., Vittorio Gallese, Giovanni Buccino, and Lucia Riggio.
“Language Sensorimotor Specificity Modulates the Motor System.” Cortex,
vol. 8, no. 7, 2012, pp. 849-856.
Menary, Richard, editor. The Extended Mind. MIT Press, 2010.
Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human
Understanding. Harvard UP, 2017.
Minard, Rosemary. Womenfolk and Fairy Tales. Muffin, 1975.
Morgan, Ben. “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture: An Introduction.” Poetics
Today, vol. 38, no. 2, 2017, pp. 213-233.
Nikolajeva, Maria. “Literacy, Competence and Meaning-Making: a Human Sciences
Approach.” Cambridge Journal of Education, vol. 40, no. 2, 2010, pp. 145-59.
---. Reading For Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature. John
Benjamins, 2014.
Oatley, Keith, and Maja Djikic, “How reading transforms us.” New York Times, 21
Dec. 2014.
Richardson, Alan, and Ellen Spolsky, editors. The Work of Fiction: Cognition,
Culture and Complexity. Ashgate, 2004.
Richter, Tobias, Markus Appel and Frank Calio. “Stories Can Change the Self-
Concept.” Social Influence, vol. 9, no. 3, 2014, pp. 172-88.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The transactional Theory of
the Literary Work. 1978. Southern Illinois UP, 1994.
Rokotnitz, Naomi. Trusting Performance: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in
Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
---. “Goosebumps, Shivers, Visualization and Embodied Resonance in the Reading
Experience: The God of Small Things.” Poetics Today, vol. 38, no. 2, 2017, pp.
273-93.
---. “‘Dignity of Agency’ In ‘The Aftermath of Personal Apocalypse:’ Martha
Nussbaum, Lionel Shriver, and the Ethics of the Particular. ” Interdisciplinary
Literary Studies: a Journal of Criticism and Theory, vol. 19, no. 2, 2017, pp.
220-41.
Scholl, B. J., and P. D. Tremoulet. “Perceptual Causality and Animacy.” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, vol. 4, no. 8, 2000, pp. 299-309.
Schank, Roger. Tell Me a Story. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990.

38
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>
 Journal of Literature and Science 11 (2018) Rokotnitz, “Fairy Tales”: 20-39

Spolsky, Ellen. “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post
Structuralism.” Poetics Today, vol. 23, no. 1, 2001, pp. 43–62.
---. Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Ashgate,
2001.
---. The Contracts of Fiction. Oxford UP, 2015.
Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. Routledge, 2002.
Swann Jones, Steven. The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination.
Routledge, 1995.
Tatar, Maria, editor and introduction. The Classic Fairy Tales. Critical ed., W.W.
Norton, 1999.
Teverson, Andrew. Fairy Tale. Routledge, 2013. The New Critical Idiom Series.
Tettamanti, Marco, et al. “Listening to Action-Related Sentences Activates Fronto-
Parietal Motor Circuits.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 17, no. 2,
2005, pp. 273-281.
Tobin, Vera. Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfaction of Plot.
Harvard UP, 2018.
Velleman, J. D. The Possibility of Practical Reason. Oxford UP, 2000.
Vandekerckhove, Marie, and Jaak Panksepp. “The Flow of Anoetic to Noetic and
Autonoetic Consciousness: A Vision of Unknowing (Anoetic) and Knowing
(Noetic) Consciousness in the Remembrance of Things Past and Imagined
Futures.” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 18, 2009, pp. 1018-28.
Vandekerckhove, Marie, and Jaak Panksepp. “A Neurocognitive Theory of Higher
Mental Emergence: From Anoetic Affective Experiences to Noetic Knowledge
and Autonoetic Awareness.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, vol.
35, 2011, pp. 2017-2025.
Wiens, Stefan, Elizabeth S. Mezzacappa, and Edward S. Katkin. “Heartbeat Detection
and The Experience of Emotions.” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 14 no. 3,
2000, pp. 417-27.
Young, Kay, and Jeffrey L. Saver. “The Neurology of Narrative.” SubStance, vol. 30,
no. 1-2, 2001, pp. 72–84.
Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and The Art of Subversion. 1983. Revised 2nd ed., Routledge,
1991; rpt with new preface by author, 2011.
--- . Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. Routledge,
2006.
Zunshine, Lisa, editor. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford
UP, 2015.
Zwaan, Rolf A., and Lawrence J. Taylor. “Seeing, Acting, Understanding: Motor
Resonance in Language Comprehension.” Journal of Experimental
Psychology, vol. 135, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-11.

39
© Format and design JLS 2018 © All other content – Author. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND
Downloaded from <http://www.literatureandscience.org/>

View publication stats