Thursday, September 5, 2002
Business matters
E-folio
Your first assignment
Review: Five criteria of folklore
Oral and transmitted orally or by custom and practice
Anonymous
Exits in variants
Traditional
Tends to be formularized
Applied these
Discuss gray areas:
Where an item might be of non-folk origin, but become folk, function like a folk item
The strange casserole
Lego WITHOUT the instructions
Barbie with hair redone
Discuss the process in the opposite direction: folk item used by an author, filmmaker
MacDonald's uses children's rhymes and jingles
Legend of PopRocks to sell Life cereal &endash; Get Mikey to eat it
Cartoons use tale plots and sometimes character
Dreadful contaminations
Also alligators in the sewers
Hot air tunnels at UVA
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Tolkien and the Fellowship of the Rings
What about material transmitted by Internet?
Do the 5 criteria apply?
What about games on Gamecube, X-Box, etc. where there is variation?
Things that function like folklore are very creative and creativity is highly valued in our culture
But, at the same time, things that are oral and anonymous and traditional and formularized are devalued
You want individuality and identity and authorship
Power of drawing on tradition and all of the associations that go with it
Power of custom and practice &endash; going beyond words
Driving versus thinking about all the things you need to do while you drive, esp. with a stick shift car
My experience with people describing the steps of a wedding versus actually performing them
Telling a folktale versus consciously coming up with a story
How do folktales and legends do according to the five criteria?
Define tale and legend
In a sense, this appears on your syllabus
Both are prose narrative, though there can be songs or poetry imbedded in them
But:
Tales: fantastic
Told at night
Pleasurable, good ending
Legends: true
Told any time
Report bad things; bad ending
Examples that they might know of folktales are:
Little Red Riding Hood
Cinderella
Jack and the Beanstalk
Sleeping Beauty
American OLDER legends are things like stories about
Paul Bunyan
Custer
Davey Crockett
Modern ones are the ones I have been using as examples
Today, folktales virtually do not exist in a pure form; are virtually always of the hybrid, gray type; no one tells Little Red Riding Hood anymore, though you are very likely to see it on TV, in cartoons and the like and heavily used in commercials &endash; the Pepsi One recent commercial
No folktales today - although my experiences in Ukraine in 2000 surprised me
And I did tell Greg the Purple Planet stories for several years
Also, as a hybrid, folktales alive and well and are the source of a great deal of popular entertainment; generate enormous revenues for film studios and producers of TV shows
RPG's are enormously folktale-like
Legends definitely DO fit the five criteria
These are alive and well and being told and created all of the time
Both here and in Russia and Ukraine
Examples: AIDS Mary
Meeting your true love on line
U Va and the hot air tunnels
Bathrooms in Cabell
Bridge leading to the Ed School (Ruffner)
Dr. Seuss and U Va
L-shaped building and the millennium
To understand the 2 prose narrative forms, let us look at them in the context of other genres
Recall 3 areas of culture
Prose narrative will part of oral or verbal culture, but with relationships to material and social
Verbal: includes folktales and legends - but also
1. Epic poetry, as in Beowulf
2. Ballads, as in Chuck Perdue and murder in Green County
Frankie and Johnny
Down by the Greenwood Siding
Big John
Barbara Allen
Lord Randall
Recent: Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
3. Other folk song - lyric song
Greensleeves
Pop! Goes the Weasel
Down in the Valley
On Top of Old Smokey
Parodies to all of these
Lullaby - they sadistic nature of these
4. Rhymes and folk poetry
Nature needs but five.
Custom gives thee seven
Laziness takes nine,
And wickedness eleven.
What are little boys, little girls made of?
a. Nursery rhymes:
Mary had a little lamb and its parodies
Little Miss Muffet
b. Counting-out
c. Jump rope
d. Rhymed insults, taunts, jeers &endash; as in Birthday rhymes, Jingle Bells
e. Peddler's cries
f. Planting rhymes
5. Riddles and other verbal puzzles
Egg
Man
Parodies - the dirty ones
Droodles - non-oral
6. Proverbs
Boys will be boys.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Some parody of proverbs: Absence makes the heart go wander.
Be true to your teeth or they will be false to you.