GOAL: To familiarize you with aspects of the fable, as narrative, symbolism, and as an allegory. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Choose two fables by Aesop. Read and annotate its characterizations. What are the attributes of the characters, both literally and in symbolic terms? Identify which characters are animals and humans, as well as their roles. Lastly, explain the ending anecdotes.

GOAL: To build on interpretive approaches, especially on the representation of animals as symbolic figures in the fable.

INSTRUCTIONS: Choose one of Aesop’s fables. Explain how wildlife/domestic animals are represented by characteristics and attributes. And review the article below on Animal Studies and explain how Aesop’s treatment of nature can be understood by this interpretative lens.

GOAL: To continue to practice critical reading and writing skills to build on initial impressions and engage with a text for understanding. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Choose two different fables and read each without the ending anecdotes. Then, explain your understanding. After, read both fables again and include the ending anecdotes. How does your understanding of each story change with the added moral?

GOAL: To build critical thinking skills on allegory in the fable. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Discuss one story retold from Aesop’s Fables and Phaedrus. Then, compare them with Native American folklore, like the Anishinaabe “Man’s Dependence on Animals.” What do you learn about differences of the characters and plot, as well as on belief systems, values, and ideology?

a. Aesop’s Fable The Wolf and the House-dog: OER Aesop’s The Wolf and the House-Dog

b. The Fables of Phaedrus: OER Fable “The Dog and the Wolf” & Phaedrus’ Fables 40

c. Man’s Dependence on Animals: OER Anishinaabe, Native American Myth

GOAL: Close Read and Comparative Exercise. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Work with one fable from Aesop’s Fables and one from the Grimm Brothers to compare the treatment of domestic animals. Then, address alternative morals as demonstrated in more recent stories, like E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952).

Secondary sources

a. Excerpts from Ortiz’s Literature & Animal Studies (2017)

b. Adler’s study of Grimm Brothers’ tales: OER Adler on Tales

The Ants and the Grasshopper

THE ANTS were spending a fine winter’s day drying grain collected in the summertime. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired of him, “Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?” He replied, “I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing.” They then said in derision: “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter.”

GOAL: To gain more practice in textual analysis of the fable and the literary trope. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of close-reading and analysis of a piece of literature on folklore.

INSTRUCTIONS: Most modern readers since the 1700s read Aesop’s Fables for the ‘moral lesson’. The story below complicates this trope. Read it and offer reflections on tensions between gender and generations. Then, explain possible morals.

The Fable and Satire in Aesop’s Fables

Any work of literature that offers ironic, humorous or even childlike entertainment may also have readings that teach an idea through a play of appearances or trickery.

The Thief and His Mother

A boy stole a lesson-book from one of his schoolfellows and took it home to his Mother. She not only abstained from beating him but encouraged him. He next time stole a cloak and brought it to her, and she again commended him. The Youth, advanced to adulthood, proceeded to steal things of still greater value. At last he was caught in the very act, and having his hands bound behind him, was led away to the place of public execution. His Mother followed in the crowd and violently beat her breast in sorrow, whereupon the young man said, “I wish to say something to my Mother in her ear.” She came close to him, and he quickly seized her ear with his teeth and bit it off. The Mother upbraided him as an unnatural child, whereon he replied, “Ah! if you had beaten me when I first stole and brought to you that lesson-book, I should not have come to this, nor have been thus led to a disgraceful death.”

GOAL: To witness how folklore offers opportunities for readers to develop an interpretive theory based on the specific theme of morality and its representation. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Many cultures rely on storytelling traditions such as fables, parables, animal tales, and trickster stories to theorize on their ideals and values, as Barbara Christian explains in The Race for Theory (1990): “…our theorizing…is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking” (Christian qtd in Adamson 2001). Work with one of Aesop’s Fables below and offer at least two interpretive readings where the tale offers different messages and morals. Then explain what audiences can learn from each one.

The Oak and the Woodcutters

THE WOODCUTTER cut down a Mountain Oak and split it in pieces, making wedges of its own branches for dividing the trunk.

The Oak said with a sigh, “I do not care about the blows of the axe aimed at my roots, but I do grieve at being torn in pieces by these wedges made from my own branches.”

Misfortunes springing from ourselves are the hardest to bear.

FABLE I. [I.5-31]

God reduces Chaos into order. He separates the four elements, and

disposes the several bodies, of which the universe is formed, into

their proper situations.

GOAL: To gain experience with the presentation of the forest as idyllic, engage in a close-reading activity on Edgar Allan Poe’s Sonnet to Science (1829) to compare how nature is represented in Aesop’s Fables and in this Romantic poem. This short writing activity builds on critical reading and thinking skills to succeed in the learning process of interpreting a piece of literature with theoretical approaches.

INSTRUCTIONS: Explicate the sonnet and explain the associations and representation of the tamarind tree. A) Engage in a close-reading activity on Edgar Allan Poe’s Sonnet to Science (1829). B) Then, compare how nature is represented in Aesop’s’ Fables and in a romantic poem: Gutenberg Poe’s “Sonnet to Science,” 1829 *A noteworthy activity is to see how representations of ‘nature’ have changed in Western literary tradition, for example, since the time of Aesop’s’ Fables. This comparison offers insights on how modern culture views nature in light of the recent emergence of colonialism and a global economy. Compare and engage in an ecocritical reading of nature. What do the differences express? What do you learn about more recent representations?