SLAV 512, September 4, 2003
Last class &endash; tension between change and stability
Making something different, new, your own
Keeping to the traditional, communicating with others, with supernatural powers
This is true on the level of the culture as a whole
And on the individual level
Turkish rug innovation &endash; goes over like a lead balloon
Some innovation is forced &endash; a particular color thread is not available
A performance is cut short by some event &endash; like no lights
A certain prominent person walks in and the performer tries to please him
Tradition evolves because of various events/external pressures
Soviet system comes in and Lenin incorporated in embroidery
Religion comes back and religious themes incorporated
In most cases, people are not conscious of what they are doing
It just feels right
This should give them something to think about in terms of creative processes in both high culture and pop culture
Look at the various articles
4 functions
Esoteric/Exoteric
Epic Laws of Folk Narrative
Orality (within the context of the traditional and formulaic &endash; that is allowed to vary, as long as it stays within tradition)
Talked about their ideas of composition
How does a story come into being?
Individual new story &endash; as about Chornobyl
Event happens and response to event
But response uses traditional melodies
Traditional ideas
Traditional language
Where all of that comes from and when it starts, almost impossible to tell, though people do try &endash; this was more of a scholarly effort in the past than now.
Oral performer and a narrative
Hear it once and repeat
But it is repetition?
Ability to compose in verse
Ability to adapt to a situation, the audience
Next &endash; there are many oral forms = genres
What are they and how are they related?
Folk concept of a genre
Basically, no such thing
So why do we bother as scholars?
Basically, only way we can deal with it
Mass of folklore
Language analogy
You can speak just fine even if you know NOTHING about language
But then you are illiterate
And people were and survived just fine for a long time
Many people still are
To study language, you need categories
To study folklore, you need genres
Turning overwhelming mass into discrete and manageable units of a manageable number.
2 genre articles
Propp
Abrahams
Problems of classification
To a certain extent, sitting around the dinner table and talking about what happened is governed by tradition
Visit to the gynecologist as folklore
Line hard to draw
Genre distinctions applied
You prepare a book of Russian folklore (or other folklore for that matter)
You are dealing with oral culture alone &endash; the stories and the songs
You want to give a nice selection, a nice picture of the tradition
You try to include as many genres as possible
You pick the nicest examples of each genre
You do have space constraints
Now you are going to arrange
How do you arrange and what does it say about the tradition?
The point is that, even when you are trying to be objective, you provide an interpretation, whether you mean to or not
Look at the khrestomatii that they brought
After this we will start looking at the genres themselves
Start with epic
Find a collection of epic poetry
Rybnikov
Gil'ferding
Astakhova
Sokolovy
Bailey
Hapgood or Chadwick