One might not expect monsters, fairy tales, and psychoanalysis to have anything to do with one another, but to Professor Mert Bahadir Reisoglu, they are intimately connected.
Professor Reisoglu is currently an assistant professor in the Germanic studies department. Prior to teaching at Duke, he received his B.A. at Yale in literature and philosophy and his P.h.D at NYU, where he explored German and Turkish literature. At Duke, he teaches several cross-listed courses in the German and English departments—many of which have a focus on the supernatural.
Last semester, I had the pleasure of taking Professor Reisoglu’s class on Grimms’ fairy tales. This class aimed to answer the question, “what makes a fairy tale, a fairy tale?” To answer this question the class explored the tropes and narrative structure of fairy tales across different cultural traditions. Beyond literary structures, the class considered analytical and psychological lenses within which fairy tales could be read.
Recently, I sat down with Professor Reisoglu to have a conversation regarding his interest in fantasy, his experience teaching cross-listed courses, and the psychology of fairy tales.
How does your experience teaching literature differ when you are teaching literature in its original language rather than in English?
“You cannot talk about the stylistic specificities of works… [but] when we do close reading [in class], we still look at word choices, and we look at the kinds of figures of speech that are used… What matters mostly [is] the method itself. Students should get a sense of how to apply literary analysis to works as if they were written in the original. … Of course, when you are teaching in the original language, then you can speak about the literary tradition, about the word choice, and the use of language in more detail..”
How do you blend English and Germanic studies in your classes?
“Cross listing [courses] works great … because there are a lot of overlaps. When you look at literary traditions, they are not isolated. There is a lot of correspondence … they actually borrow ideas from one another. [When studying English and Germanic texts], we use the same theories and methods of analysis. Each country, each literary tradition has its own set of texts as well, and a history of criticism, but at the same time the methods are the same. That’s also why this is our pedagogical goal, to teach students to engage with texts closely.”
What sparked your interest in Grimms’ Fairy Tales?
“[My interest] has something to do with expecting from fiction and from art…something that doesn’t exist in reality… [I expect them to] not only just talk about reality but also imaginatively reinvent that reality … Grimms’ Fairy Tales are especially interesting … Grimms’ tales are raw, in a sense. We have seen in the course that they are not like the tales of Basile, nor Perrault. There is some rawness to it that is very intellectually interesting.”
How did you develop your course on monsters and the supernatural?
“We have this personal interest and then we have pedagogical goals. With [regard to] the pedagogical goals, it is trying to think of how the literary methods of analysis can be taught while doing something cool, something interesting. When I was developing that course, I found out that this was especially a great way of also teaching about psychoanalysis … Horror is great for psychoanalysis. You do deep reading; you read really, really closely and try to understand the human psyche by using horror as an example.”
What psychological themes do you attempt to convey in your courses?
“We look at the idea of monsters and vampires and doppelgangers; psychological horror plays a very important role. Early childhood experiences, the limitations of selfhood and uncanny repetitions play a significant role in horror media, but as we have seen in class, they are also central to fairy tales.
… I taught a lot of courses on literary theory too, for the majors in literature in Istanbul. And formalist criticism, structuralist criticism, are the hardest to teach. Fairytales are great for that because you can read a lot of different tales and start seeing the repetitions and variations and focus more on the form rather than the content.”
What courses are you thinking about teaching in the future?
“For the future, next year in the constellation, I'm going to be teaching a course on surveillance. This is going to be a course on both ideas of surveillance and also the way it affects our everyday life. There will also be a lot of emphasis on technology, and media theory as well … After that, in the future, I might teach more courses on media and I might teach a course on surrealism and provocation.”
