Course Outline
FOLK 2401 / ENGL 2601: Oral Literature
Storytelling and Other Verbal Genres
Fall 2016
T & Th, 1:00-2:15
Ian Brodie
office: CE-263C
e-mail: [email protected]
office hours: W 1-3, or by appointment
Calendar Description
Analysis of storytelling, myths, folktales, legends, personal experience narratives, jokes, riddles, rhymes,
and proverbs.
What this means:
The main purpose of Folk 2401 / ENGL 2601 is to help students understand the genres and sub-genres of
folk literature. Upon completion of this course you should be able to effectively identify, analyze and
interpret folk literature texts collected within your own culture and internationally. Furthermore, the
course hopes to show how elements of folk literature are still used today in popular culture.
Evaluation
(See detailed descriptions below)
Micro-quizzes (10 x 1%)
Analysis assignment
Second assignment
Take-home Exam
10%
30%
40%
20%
Throughout the semester
October 25
November 29
Available December 1, due December 15
Course Breakdown and Reading Schedule
September 13
September 15
Introducing Folk Literature
Bascom
Defining Folk Literature
Märchen and Fairy Tale
Reading Tales
September 20
Hallett and Karasek Reading Tales Diachronically
September 22
Korguev
A Long Tale
September 27
Dundes
What a Tale Isn’t
September 29
Propp (2012)
The Life of the Tale
Tales as Things
October 4
Propp (1968)
Analysing Märchen 1.1
October 6
Propp (1968 cont.) Analysing Märchen 1.2
October 11
Holbek
Analysing Märchen 2
October 13
Olrik
October 18/20
Out of town: Self-directed study time
Tales as Performances
October 25
Crowley
October 27
MacDonald
Greenhill
Analysing Märchen 3
Form and Style
Representing Performance
Tales and their Influence on the Western Tradition
November 1
Zipes
November 3
Lee
Personal Experience Narrative
November 8
Stahl
Personal Experience Narratives
November 10
Cody
PEN as Social Commentary
November 15
Mukerji
PEN as Play
November 17
Bethke
PEN as Performance
November 22
Oring
Jokes and Story
November 24
Klymasz
Jokes and Belonging
November 29
Christie
Jokes and Disaster
Jokes
Final Class
December 1
Assignments
Micro-quizzes
Every week there will be one quiz with two fairly simple, straightforward questions, based on that week’s
readings. Completing them in a timely manner will not only garner you an easy 10%, but they will unlock
the notes from that week’s lectures. They are time-sensitive (you only have until the following Tuesday to
complete them), so if they are not completed you will not get access to those notes.
Analysis Assignment (30%) – due October 25
By this time in the semester you will know what the folklorist means by tale and, specifically, the fairy tale.
This assignment has you look for two versions of the same tale.
Peruse the folktale collections in the library (look through the GR section) and find two different
versions of the same tale (i.e. a version each from two different cultures). Using the frameworks of and
making explicit reference to Olrik, Propp, and Holbek, compare and contrast them. How are the versions
similar? How are they different? What motifs do they share or not share?
Consult the description in the tale type index (which will be placed on reserve). Why do we consider
these “the same story”?
Find one academic article or book chapter about this tale type written within the last 25 years (not
necessarily the particular version you are using, but of the same type). What has been said about this
particular tale, and how does the folklorist / academic consider tale? What is your opinion of this author’s
critique? How does it apply (or not) to your versions?
As you start to summarise your findings, you should be thinking about differences in audience, media, and
genre.
A portion of class time on September 22 will be devoted to discussing the assignment.
Second Assignment: (40%) – due November 29
Choose ONE of the following
1. Research Essay: Taking a tale from folk tradition, you are to examine how that tale has been in used
in a popular culture mediation (popular novel, live-action film, animated film, cartoon series,
parody, etc.). You have the option of either discussing the tale in one particular manifestation – for
example, Little Red Riding Hood as depicted in Matthew Bright’s Freeway (1996) – or the use of a
resonant motif in a number of manifestations – for example, the “kissing a frog to turn him into a
prince” motif (D735.1) in cartoons. You should be asking structural questions (how does a non-oral
version of the tale differ from the oral), contextual questions (what surface elements are presented
to make the tale ‘relevant’ to the intended audience), and functional question (why is the tale or
motif being (re-)used in the first place). For this assignment you should have a number of secondary
sources on the tale itself, and on similar transpositions from oral to non-oral media.
2. Creative Assignment: Take a traditional narrative – Märchen, legend, joke, etc. – and retell it in some
form, whether oral, dramatic, animation, digital video, comic book, music, etc. Feel free to be as
imaginative as you wish. Accompanying the creative part should be a description and identification
of what you used as your source material(s), what changes you made on aesthetic reasons, what
changes you made due to the nature of the media you chose, and why you chose that particular
narrative.
A portion of class time on November 1 will be devoted to discussing the assignment.
Final Exam: 20% – due December 15
A short take-home essay question, which will cover the overarching themes of the course. You will be
expected to refer to specific readings.
Required Readings (on Moodle)
[Items marked with an * will take you to JSTOR to download the PDF: if you are accessing from offcampus this may require an additional log-in.]
* Bascom, William. 1965. The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives. Journal of American Folklore 78.307: 320.
* Bethke, Robert D. 1976. Storytelling at an Adirondack Inn. Western Folklore 35.2: 123-139.
* Cody, Cornelia. 2005. ‘Only in New York’: The New York City Personal Experience Narrative. Journal
of Folklore Research 42.2: 217-244.
* Crowley, Daniel J., Albert Gay and Ezekial Mackey. 1954. Form and Style in a Bahamian Folktale.
Caribbean Quarterly 3.4: 218-234.
Davies, Christie. 2003. Jokes That Follow Mass-Mediated Disasters in a Global Electronic Age. Of Corpse:
Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture. Ed. Peter Narváez, 15-34. Logan, UT: Utah State
University Press.
Dundes, Alan. 1986. Fairy tales from a folkloristic perspective. In Fairy tales and society: Illusion, Allusion,
and Paradigm. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ed., 259-269. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Greenhill, Pauline. 1985. Excerpts from Lots of Stories: Maritime Narratives from the Creighton Collection,2-9;
15-28. National Museum of Man, Mercury Series, Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies Paper
No. 57. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.
Hallett, Martin and Barbara Karasek, eds. 2009. Little Red Riding Hood. Folk and Fairy Tales, 4th ed., 2762. Toronto: Broadview.
Holbek, Bengt. 1989. The Language of Fairy Tales. Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies. Ed. Reimund Kvideland
and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, 40-62. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP.
Klymasz, Robert. 1970. The Ethnic Joke in Canada Today. Keystone Folklore Quarterly 15.4: 167-173.
Korguev, M. M. 2014. The Airplane (How an Airplane in a Room Carried Off the Tsar's Son). Long, Long
Tales from the Russian North, ed. and trans. Jack V. Haney, 109-136. Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi.
Lee, Linda J. 2014. Ugly Stepsisters and Unkind Girls: Reality TV’s Repurposed Fairy Tales. Channeling
Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, ed. Pauline Greenhill and Jill Rudy, 275-293. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press.
MacDonald, Wilmot. 1962. The Bull Story. Eight Folktales from Miramichi, ed. Helen Creighton and Edward
D. Ives, 13-20. Spec. issue of Northeast Folklore 4.
Mieder, Wolfgang. 2014. Futuristic Paremiography and Paremiology: A plea for the collection and study of
modern proverbs. Folklore Fellows Network 44: 13-17; 20-24.
* Mukerji, Chandra. 1978. Bullshitting: Road Lore among Hitchhikers. Social Problems 25.3: 241-52.
Olrik, Axel. 1965. The Epic Laws of Folk Narrative. The Study of Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes, 129-141.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Oring, Elliott. 1992. Between Jokes and Tales. Jokes and Their Relations, 81-93. Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky.
Propp, Vladimir Yakovlevich. 1971. The Functions of Dramatis Personae. Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd
ed., 25-65. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Propp, Vladimir Yakovlevich. 2012. The Life of the Folktale. The Russian Folktale, ed. and trans. Sibelan
Forrester, 300-316. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
* Stahl, Sandra K.D. 1977. The Personal Narrative as Folklore. Journal of the Folklore Institute 14.1-2: 9-30.
Zipes, Jack. 2002. Once There Was a Time: An Introduction to the History and Ideology of Folk and Fairy
Tales. Breaking the Magical Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, revised and updated edition,
1-22. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.