We will cover the major genres of Russian oral literature and as many of the minor genres as times allows. We will also cover as much folklore theory as possible. We will certainly cover at least the major issues and approaches concerning each genre.
I have ordered a Хрестоматия which has sample texts for each of the major genres, important articles on the major issues, and a bibliography. You will find it a useful resource. You will also make extensive use of the library. I will want you to find each of the major collections and bring it to class. You will take turns doing the library runs. The purpose of the library runs is for you to know the location of the major works so that you will be able to find them with ease when you need them. It also never hurts to actually see the major collections, to get a sense of the collector or author, to see what was included and how it was arranged.
You will also take turns presenting theoretical works. This course is a seminar and so you should get practice in presenting important theories and your reactions to or interpretations of these theories. This will serve as practice for writing book reviews, something that you will need to do as a professional. It will also give you presentation practice. All scholars present their work at conferences and this will provide training for such presentations. Thus, I expect your presentation to be formal and polished. It should be accompanied by handouts or a PowerPoint presentation. You may also do presentations using e-folio.
On those occasions when you are not presenting, you should be reacting to the presentations of your classmates, critiquing their work in constructive ways, questioning in a way that helps them clarify their thinking and their understanding of the material that they present. I am considering assigning a respondent to each presenter, analogous to the discussant at professional meetings.
This year I will also assign work that is less formal. I will give out sets of questions for each topic and ask you to go and find the answers. The questions will serve as a guide to the important issues for the topic or genre in question. They will also allow you to do hands-on work throughout the course. I have not decided whether I will give the same set of questions to the whole class, or break the class up into teams and give each team a question set. A great deal will depend on who is in the class and what sorts of material the class members can handle. Language is, of course, an issue. I will need to see how much I can rely on primary sources.
You will write one long paper, approximately 20 pages in length. This is the sort of paper where you practice article-writing and it should be an analytical paper that tackles some sort of научный вопрос. You could, for example, look at epic and lament and, on the basis of the imagery used in the two genres, or the formal characteristics of the two genres, or the performers of the two genres, argue for or against a genetic relationship. I will give you more suggestions for paper topics as the time approaches. Your long paper is due on the last day of class, or December 4.
SYLLABUS: At this point, I am assuming approximately half of the semester devoted to poetry and about half of it devoted to prose.
Unit one: We will begin with my doing a brief what is folklore and what is folklife unit, in other words, фольклор и этнография. After that, I will do a классификация жанров and we will discuss classification problems. Basically, all genres are interrelated. So, where does one make the genre divisions and how does one group the material?
We will also take a quick look at the history of approaches to folklore.
Unit two: Epic poetry (былини)
The three cycles.
The basic collections
Oral theory and problems of performers and performance.
Formal features
Marxist approaches; historical approaches to epic
Unit three: Related genres
Epic and lament
Epic and historical song (исторические песни)
Historical song content and historical song heroes
Ballads
Religious verse (духовные стихи, псальмы)
Religious verse content
The special performers of religious verse
Unit four: Lyric song
Lyric song and ritual song
Lullabies and other in-between genres
Children’s verse
Dance songs and частушки
I would also like to include at least a glance at Soviet versions of the various genres of folk poetry and I would like us to look a Miller’s book on Folklore for Stalin.
Unit five: Folk prose. We will begin with the largest genre, the folktale or сказка. Again, we need the major collections.
Then, we need the approaches to the tale. Since the folktale seems to be the one universal genre, as in it is found among all peoples, the world over, there has been an enormous amount written about this folklore form.
One of the biggest issues in connection with the tale is classification. The issue of classification subsumes (or presumes certain assumptions about) the origin of tales and the spread of tales from one geographical area and one people to another. You will need to know at least the historico-geographic method and the AT Index.
Although there are many approaches to the tale, they could be grouped into two basic camps: tales as connected to a historical past (tales and the rituals, beliefs, practices of a particular people) and tales as connected to an individual human past (tales as narratives of childhood and child development). We will look at both approaches.
To begin with, we will look at the major Russian collections and see how the tales were collected, prepared for publication, arranged. You will need to know at least a little bit about the history of collecting.
Unit six: The Grimm brothers and early collecting in
Europe. Anti Aarne and the
historico-geographic method. Russian
versions of the AT Index. Structuralist
approaches to the tale: Vladimir Propp and The Morphology of the
Folktale.
Unit seven: Historical and mythic approaches. Пропп, Историческик корни волшебной сказки. Haney and the mythic substratum. Possibly Рыбаков, Язычество древних славян, Язычество древней руси.
Unit eight: Psychoanalytic approaches: Bettelheim and Uses of Enchantment, the studies of Marie von Franz, possibly Jung and The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, possibly Freud.
Unit nine: The more modern approaches: Marina Warner, Jack Zipes. Soviet use of folktale; folktale-based pop culture such as cartoons.
Unit ten: “True” prose: предания, легенды, the Russian equivalent of what is called legend in English; the special category of the urban legend.
Unit eleven: малые жанры, things like: пословицы и поговорки, закленания. I would also like to look at the border between the oral and the written. Magic texts especially tend to be written down and used in written form, whether to preserve the correct wording, or for use as amulets.