Course Outline FOLK 2404: Urban Legend Ian Brodie T-Th, 1-2:15, Winter 2017 office: CE-263C e-mail: [email protected] Calendar Description A study of contemporary legends, conspiracy theories, and rumour in North American culture, with an examination of how they function and how they affect our perceptions. Fair Warning Participants in the course should be advised that much of the material being studied may be considered offensive, or potentially trigger adverse reactions. Sexuality, racist attitudes, and religion are all discussed at length, and your fellow students may struggle to express opinions in a way suitable for classroom discussions. Let us go into this with patience, and not seek out offense when none is necessarily meant. Different Kind of Fair Warning I’m writing a new book and one of the things I need to do is refresh myself on some aspects of legend and belief. Since I have forty excellent students I’m going to take the advantage and work through my reading list with you. This should be fun. Required Texts Everything is on Moodle. A reading a day. Read it, come to class, we discuss it, we move on. Evaluation Database Assignment Annotation Assignment Midterm Final Exam 30% 40% 15% 15% Class-by-Class Breakdown and Reading Schedule I used to break things down by unit, compartmentalizing everything. This semester I’m simply moving from one article to another. There is an order and a rationale to it but I’m approaching it more as an unfolding of the complexities of legend scholarship with one topic seguing into the next. Jan. 5 Beginnings Jan. 10 Hufford, David J. 1982. Traditions of Disbelief. New York Folklore 8.3/4: 47-56. Jan. 12 Barnes, Daniel R. 1996. Interpreting Urban Legends. Contemporary Legend: A Reader, ed. Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, 1-16. New York: Garland. Jan. 17 Ellis, Bill. 1989. When is a Legend? An Essay in Legend Morphology. The Questing Beast: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend IV, ed. Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, 31-53. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Jan. 19 Buchan, David. 1992. Folkloristic Methodology and a Modern Legend. Folklore Processed: in Honour of Lauri Honko on his 60th Birthday, ed. Reimund Kvideland, 89-103. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Jan. 24 Bennett, Gillian. 1999. Belief and Disbelief. “Alas, Poor Ghost!”: Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse, 9-38. Logan, UT: Utah State UP. Jan. 26 Goldstein, Diane E. 2007. Scientific Rationalism and Supernatural Experience Narratives. Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore, ed. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie B. Thomas, 60-78. Logan, UT: Utah State UP. Jan. 31 Ellis, Bill. 2001. The Varieties of Alien Experience. Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live, 142-159. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Feb. 2 Turner, Patricia A. 1993. Conclusion: From Cannibalism to Crack. I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture, 202-220. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feb. 7 Goldstein, Diane E. 2004. What Exactly Did They Do with That Monkey, Anyway? Contemporary Legend, Scientific Speculation, and the Politics of Blame in the Search for AIDS Origins. Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception, 77-99. Logan, UT: Utah State UP. Feb. 9 Whatley, Mariamne H. and Elissa R. Henken. 2000. Of Gerbils and Stomach Pumps: Homophobia in Legends. “Did You Hear About the Girl Who …? Contemporary Legends, Folklore, & Human Sexuality, 91-113. New York and London: New York UP. Feb. 14 Conn, Joel. 2011. A Pocahontas by any other name: A legend regarding naming from Scotland. Contemporary Legend series 3 1: 1-28. Feb. 16 Midterm Exam Feb 21 and 23 Midterm Break Feb. 28 Gallo, Marcia M. 2014. The Parable of Kitty Genovese, the New York Times, and the Erasure of Lesbianism. Journal of the History of Sexuality 23.2: 273-294. Mar. 2 Frank, Russell. 2004. When the going gets tough, the tough go photoshopping: September 11 and the newslore of vengeance and victimization. New Media & Society 6.5:633658. Mar. 7 Peck, Andrew. 2015. At the Modems of Madness: The Slender Man, Ostension, and the Digital Age. Contemporary Legend series 3 5: 14-37. Mar. 9 Tolbert, Jeffrey A. 2015. “Dark and Wicked Things”: Slender Man, the Folkloresque, and the Implications of Belief. Contemporary Legend series 3 5: 38-61. Mar. 14 Kitta, Andrea. 2015. “What Happens When the Pictures Are No Longer Photoshops?” Slender Man, Belief, and the Unacknowledged Common Experience. Contemporary Legend series 3 5: 62-76. Mar. 16 Tucker, Elizabeth. 2007. Legend Quests. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses, 182-210. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Mar. 21 Hammond, Joyce D. 1995. The Tourist Folklore of Pele: Encounters with the Other. Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural, ed. Barbara Walker, 159-179. Logan, UT: Utah State UP. Mar. 23 Lindahl, Carl. 2005. Ostensive Healing: Pilgrimage to the San Antonio Ghost Tracks. Journal of American Folklore 118.468: 164-185. Mar. 28 Holly, Donald H., Jr. and Casey E. Cordy. 2007. What’s in a Coin? Reading the Material Culture of Legend Tripping and Other Activities. Journal of American Folklore 120.477: 335-354. Mar. 30 Course evaluations / conclusions / exam preparation Apr. 4 Buffer day Database Assignment – Ongoing, to be completed by March 7 An opportunity to experiment with a new assignment, this requires you to discover five contemporary legends—or what you can argue is something akin to contemporary legend—in your day to day life. Using the database option on Moodle, you will create a record that identifies the source (Internet, popular culture, or IRL) of the legend, describes the “text / texture / context” of its performance, and justifies why you think it is a legend. After entering two entries you will be able to see your classmates contributions and add comments: you must comment on at least three other entries. More detailed instructions will be available once the database template is completed, which will be by the end of the second week of classes. *There are a number of television programmes –Urban Legends Exposed, Mythbusters, and the like – and websites – particularly snopes.com – which are not to be cited in this ‘legend-spotting’ exercise. Annotation assignment – Due March 30 Students will conduct a short ethnographic collecting exercise, in which they will collect a contemporary legend text in as natural a context as possible, which they will in turn transcribe, identify, and search for parallel versions. They will also include a short write-up (1200-1500 words) providing a description of the narrative context, interpreting how the legend is interpreted by the performer, by the group in which it was performed, and by the student him- or herself, and reflecting on the nature of the collection exercise itself. Library / database research is expected, with at least three academic citations to provide context for your legend / argument for legendry. I have no problem with double-dipping: you may choose one of the items collected for the database assignment and expand on it. Midterm and Final Exams Multiple-choice and short answer questions based on readings and lectures. Midterm February 16; final in exam period. General Policies Assignments: All assignments must be completed in order to pass this course. Late or missed assignments: The two assignments are due by midnight of their respective due dates. Anything later than that will be penalised at one mark per day. About Internet sources If you must use them, at the very least use Google Scholar to start your searches. And remember, if you can find something, cut and paste it, and claim it as your own, I can certainly find it again and expose you. Plagiarism: Plagiarism is defined by the university calendar as follows: Plagiarism is the act of representing the intellectual work of others as one’s own. Such misrepresentation is treated as a serious violation of academic standards and principles. When a student submits work for a course, it is assumed that the work is original except where the student properly acknowledges the use of other sources. Of course, good scholarship often requires drawing on the work of others, but any borrowed material – including words, ideas, data, statistics, graphics and other intellectual matter, whether drawn from print, electronic, or other non-print sources – must be fully acknowledged according to the accepted practices of the relevant discipline. (CBU Calendar) This means that when you use sources, whether they are from the library, from the Internet, or (as is often the case in folklore) from interviews with people, you must clearly distinguish both (a) what are someone else’s ideas as opposed to your own, and (b) what are someone else’s words as opposed to your own. I have found that many students leave themselves open to the charge of plagiarism by either doing little to clearly make the distinction between their own work and someone else’s, or (more often) not quite grasping the concept of what the essay is. An essay is more than a number of sources interwoven with some linking material: it is an effort at expressing an original idea which is more often than not based in part on other peoples’ own efforts at expressing similar or parallel ideas. So, of course (as the policy says) you will be quoting and drawing ideas from other people, but remember: • There is nothing wrong with quoting somebody, even quoting them extensively, provided that you recognise and indicate in the text that this is not your idea or words but those of someone else. • There is nothing wrong with paraphrasing somebody, provided that you recognise and indicate in the text that, although they may now be your words, they are someone else’s ideas. • A list of references (bibliography, works cited, etc.) is simultaneously both mandatory and insufficient for citing. So, practice safe essay-writing: clearly indicate how you are using sources, and hand-in something that goes beyond an artful compilation of other people’s ideas and aims at some kind of synthesis between what others have said and what you have to say. Any student who plagiarises will automatically receive a mark of zero on the assignment: he or she will not have the opportunity to resubmit; and the Dean of Arts and Social Sciences and, if different, the student’s Dean, will be informed.
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