Things get so intense during the official first week of classes that I try to work ahead as a student in this class as much as I can during Week 0... and I'm already at the part of Week 2 where I am brainstorming a Storybook to do for this semester. I know I want to do something related to TRICKSTERS, but I am not sure what the best focus will be. Here are four ideas:
Tricksters in the African Diaspora: It would be really cool to pick four stories that are well represented in the African diaspora so that I could compare an African version with a Brer Rabbit version with an Anansi version... maybe even multiple versions of the story. This is definitely the project I am leaning towards since it would take good advantage of the fact that I could tell three stories on one page. I would develop them a little more beyond the 100-word versions, but still keep them short, around 300 words. Web sources:
Anansi.LauraGibbs.net
Rabbit.LauraGibbs.net
... plus African sources online.
African Brer Rabbit and the Southeastern Nations. I would really like to learn more about the back-and-forth between the Brer Rabbit stories of African American storytellers and the storytelling traditions of the Cherokee and other southeastern nations. A key source for this would be Swanton's book: Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians... plus Mooney's Cherokee stories, plus Harris's Brer Rabbit and other Brer Rabbit sources. I'm not quite sure how I would organize this; maybe stories side by side, with three or four stories on a page?
World Tricksters. This would be a chance to profile some of the best tricksters, each with a page of their own. I could do Aesop's fox and the Reynard tradition, African tortoise stories, African American Brer Rabbit, and Caribbean Anansi. For this one, I would probably do the 100-word stories so that I could include seven or eight stories for each trickster.
Web sources: Rabbit.LauraGibbs.net, Anansi.LauraGibbs.net, illustrated Aesop, and African folktales online.
Aesop's Tricksters in English and Latin. This would be a fun project for figuring out the best way to present my Latin materials using a Google Site set-up. I'm pretty happy with how I am using a blog to do that, but it would be fun to see what Google Sites has to offer. Of the four topics, this is the one I am probably least likely to choose, but it would give me some direction in the fables I'm choosing to work on, focusing on tricksters! Here's the blog where I'm doing that:
Bestiaria Latina ... I haven't been focusing on tricksters there in particular, but I could do that going forward!
And as a trickster from Aesop, here's the fox tricking some other foxes!
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