Judith Grossman: Instead of a Muse: A Genealogy for Stories (January 2014)

Elements of the folktale persist throughout the transformations of the modern story. Grossman’s lecture investigates how the Hero/Heroine, the Enemy and the Ally, the Treasure, the loss of a parent or exile from home, and the factor of lucky work like traditional post-and-beam in narrative, looking at the Grimm Brothers’ “The Devil with Three Golden Hairs,” E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman,” Samuel Beckett’s “First Love,” and stories by Alice Munro.