Week 4: Taking Research One Step Further

This past week, I felt that I was challenged while I was trying to find information to provide cultural context for the tale that I was responsible for in the group presentations. We had to show how things, such as a Propp's function, genre convention, motif, or character, were represented by each of our tales and what might have accounted for the differences in them.

My tale was The Hairy Boy, which falls under the category of Folktales of Type 650A: The Strong Boy. The tale originated from Switzerland, which meant that I needed to do some research on the culture background of Switzerland. Since we, as a class, have so far mainly focused on Grimms and Perrault, looking into a tale from Switzerland felt like a curve ball was thrown at me. At first, it was really hard to know where to start. Even on Wikipedia, I felt that I could not find anything that had to do with my tale. Then, I changed my approach. I had been trying to find something that would tell me the reasons for why the tale was written. When I realized that I would not be able to find something like that, I broadened my search. For example, I wanted to find out more about why the hairy boy and his mother were sent out. I thought to myself, "Why was the king mad that his wife gave birth to a hairy being?" I then thought that maybe he was mad that his wife may have committed sodomy. This prompted me to make a search about sodomy in Switzerland. After reading through a few websites, I found one that stated that accussing someone of sodomy was a relatively frequent pratice in Swiss politics. In the tale, the king's mother is the one who accuses the king's wife. I thought that the tale must be incorporating a part of Swiss politics in the story. Through this assignment, I was able to grasp the concept of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation, which is one of our course objectives.

Althought the researching was hard at first, I think that I am now better at using Google to find information that is useful. This skill will definitely help me on future assignments as well as further down the line in my life. I feel more confident to do more assignments that involve rhetorical analysis and understanding the cultural context. I now know how to use a piece of information that is only somewhat related to guide me to information that is very relevant.