Remediation and intertextuality in Garner's 'politically correct' representation of Cinderella
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Date
2017
Authors
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Publisher
University of the Western Cape
Abstract
Fairy tales have been changing continuously. From the likes of the Greek and Chinese
versions of the Cinderella tale, Cinderella has been transformed into other versions.
Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm had their way with the story of Cinderella with
both parties putting their own mark on the tale. Disney made the story notorious as the
consumers mostly tend to remember Disney's version and not earlier writers of the story
(Zipes, 1999). Since then, various other versions in the current sphere of story-telling,
especially through movie-making, have had a series of re-telling of the story. James
Finn Garner's "Politically Correct Bedtime Stories" has made its mark in the world of
politically correct, versions of fairy tales. He has graced readers with his satire and
thereby challenged the more traditional versions of the story of Cinderella (and others)
by posing a dry, humorous twist and facing the 'issues' which underlie the social
problems in Cinderella such as equality, sexism and patriarchal, inappropriate gender
biased terminology. Garner takes it upon himself to remediate the story of Cinderella
through transformations of events and socially structured power relations, reworking the
plot and characters and reformulation of gender-biased terminology. This results in a
witty politically correct remodelling of the story which upholds a general moral in line
with the contemporary socio-political ethos, championing usage of politically correct
language.
Description
Magister Artium - MA (Linguistics, Language and Communication)
Keywords
Political correctness, Cinderella, Interdiscursivity, Intertextuality, Hybridity, Multimodality, Resemiotisation, Semiotic remediation, Garner, Disney