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“Archive” comes from the Ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον, “house of the ruler”: inside, we find what corresponds to the normative framework; outside, everything that dissents and is not conform. This occurs for the heteropatriarchal archive of intimate partner violence, as it is explored by Carmen Maria Machado in In the Dream House (2019), and for the archive of folklore, ruled by each (re-)teller’s framework. What if we regain the oral dimension of the tale tradition in a diffractive perspective? What if the reader entangles with the text, co-creating a new meaning? In this paper, I propose to shed a light on the possibilities of diffracting the folkloric archive, to shift the archival-ruled narratives in the direction of self-representation and empoderamiento for the subjectivities expelled from the archival narratives. Two are the paths proposed: firstly, situated literary retellings, with a focus on Machado’s memoir; and secondly, wild pedagogy and slow scholarship methodologies and practices, enabling the experience of the reader to entangle with and diffract the tales’ narratives.

In the article are presented Slovenian women fairy tale writers who were included in the streams of fairy tale writing in the middle of the 19th century, when Josipina Turnograjska published the fairy tale “Rožmanova Lenčica” (Rožman’s Lenčica) in 1853. This is much later than the start of European women fairy tale writing, which has its roots in the late medieval period with the trobairitz, and continued in the 16th century. After that the new stream of women fairy tale writers developed with the preciosite in the 17th century. The author researches development of women fairy tale writing in Slovenia and classifies their creation of fairy tales in two main models: writing literary fairy tales and storytelling or performing folktales. Lately, among Slovenian women, writing contemporary fairy tales is also popular.

This article presents, with the help of comparative analysis, fairy tales included into Slovenian curriculum and textbooks of various publishers for upper level of primary school. The main part of the discussion represents all the texts with fairy-tale elements that are included in the analysed literary learning books from the genre and motif point of view. Each interpretation of the text includes didactic and literary instruments that present fairy tale elements to pupils.