Future Course Offerings
Autumn 2008
English 270 Introduction to FolkloreInstructor: Sheila Bock
TR 11:30-1:18
# 09018-6
This class explores forms of traditional, vernacular culture--including verbal art, custom, and material culture--shared by men and women from a number of regional, ethnic, religious, and occupational groups. At the same time, we will consider various interpretive, theoretical approaches to examples of folklore and folklife discussed, and we will investigate the history of folklore studies and the cultural contexts in which this field has flourished. Recurring central issues will include the dynamics of tradition, the nature of creativity and artistic expression, and the construction of personal and group identities.
NELC 360: Sheherazade and Company: Sex, Gender and Power in Middle Eastern Storytelling
Instructor: Margaret Mills
MW 10:30-12:30
# 22540-1
Since the Brothers Grimm made their famous collection, most westerners have been in the habit of considering folktales to be "kiddie lit." In many societies where oral narrative traditions are still active, though, folktales are told that engage adults with a full range of human concerns, including "adult themes". This course explores adults' oral storytelling as practiced today, and its depiction in literature from medieval south and western Asia to the modern Middle East. We will investigate how storytellers, male and female, portray gender relations, social norms and stereotypes, starting with that archetypal Middle Eastern storyteller, Sheherazade of the 1001 Nights. She tells her tales to distract and reform a murderous king and save the lives of the women of her community. We will then look at some other medieval story collections as well, where women's own antisocial behavior is the subject (and object) of strategic storytelling. We will examine the storytelling of living performers, men and women, recorded by Ohio State's own Professor Sabra Webber in Tunisia, and by Margaret Mills in Afghanistan, and finally we will look at Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass and Azar Naficy's Reading Lolita in Tehran, two memoirs about stories and the use of story from key contemporary women writers. All examples, from India to Morocco, are in English.
English 367.05 Memory and Place in the University District (The US Folk Experience)
Instructor: Prof. Ray Cashman
MW 1:30-3:18
# 09070-1
To better appreciate memory, place, and community in everyday life we will collect oral histories in our own backyard from residents of the University District. You will learn fieldwork techniques used by anthropologists, folklorists, and oral historians (e.g., interviewing, participant-observation, transcription). Ethnographic writing assignments will include reflections on the fieldwork process, how the past is represented in the present and to what ends, and how mere space is transformed into meaningful place through narrative. Interview transcripts, fieldwork documentation, and analyses will be deposited in the archives of the OSU Center for Folklore Studies. 367.05 fulfills the GEC “Social Diversity in the US” requirement and the second composition course you need to graduate. Pending approval this course may be taken for “Service Learning” credit.
English 577.03 Irish Folklore (Issues and Methods in the Study of Folklore)
Instructor: Prof. Ray Cashman
TR 1:30-3:18
# 09106-7
This course introduces the popular beliefs, vernacular customs, material culture, and oral traditions of Ireland, north and south. Although much Irish folklore has roots in the far distant past, we will focus on those traditions documented from the late 18th through 21st centuries—a period during which folklore inspired the Irish literary revival and served the nation-building project of a newly independent republic. We will conclude with an investigation of the politics of culture, identity, and heritage in contemporary Northern Ireland where the legacy of British colonialism remains most pronounced. Students will work with and help process as-yet unreleased audio materials from the archives of the Ulster Folk Museum. Other assignments will include a midterm exam and final 8-10 page paper.
CS 597 Global Folklore
Instructors: Prof. Sabra Webber (Columbus) and Prof. Katherine Borland (Newark)
MW 1:30-3:18
# 05906-3
This capstone course for nonmajors addresses issues of the contemporary world through the medium of folklore and the study of folkloristics. Drawing upon examples from around the world (Africa, the Middle East, India, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, the South Pacific and so on) we will consider what part of our contemporary culture is “lore” and how traditional cultural resources interact with commercial, mediated and state-generated cultural constructs. We will examine oral, musical, visual and material cultural expressions. We will explore how the types, motifs, and characteristics of folklore find their way into popular literature and film as well as how folklore adapts and shapes the products of commercial mass media. Finally, we will identify the ways in which communities around the world, including those of students in the course, use their folklore as a counter-hegemonic resource to resist or negotiate regional and global powers. Jennifer Heath, editor of The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics, will be a guest speaker speaking on the practices of veiling of men, women, and material culture objects around the world. The course will be team taught in two electronically linked classrooms on the Columbus and Newark Campuses. Requirements include a midterm, two film essays and a final paper.
CS 677.02 Tourists, Travelers, and Tricksters
Instructor: Prof. Sabra Webber
M 5:30-8:18 PM
# 05910-7
“Travelers, Tourists, Tricksters” is an investigation of different sorts of travelers--explorers, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, NGO and government officials and workers, missionaries--as well as of the contemporary phenomenon of tourism and related theories. We will look at a wide range of travel narratives and their relation to trickster stories as they arise in different cultural and historical contexts. (We may take a look as well at tricksters who stay put.) It is to be hoped that students will produce papers that circle around these themes and that their projects will intersect in ways that will enhance the work of fellow students in the seminar. We will start with several works that address the trickster and, at least indirectly, the trickiness of travel. The book, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa, by Johannes Fabian, from which we will read two chapters, attends mostly to travel and exploration, but the trickster theme is there for us to discover. The article, “’A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered,” by Barbara Babcock-Abrahams provides something of a check-list of trickster characteristics. We will then move from past to present travel and from explorers to travelers to tourists in the readings for the next few weeks. Examples of readings to be addressed are excerpts from Imperial Eyes and Travelers and Travel Liars as well as shorter articles such as “The Philosopher as Traveler,” “Looking for Virgil’s Tomb,” Passport Nuisance,” “All these Frontiers,” “Exploration to Travel to Tourism,” “Issues in the Anthropology of Tourism,” “Thanatourism in the Early 21st Century: Moral Panics, Ulterior Motives and Alterior Desires” and “Tourism at Borders of Conflict and (De)militarized Zones.”
Comparative Studies 694 Development Theory: Service Learning in Nicaragua
Instructor: Prof. Katherine Borland
The Ohio State University at Newark is pleased to again offer its service learning program in Nicaragua. Students with a sense of adventure and a desire to learn in a non-traditional setting must apply no later than April 30th to be considered for the program. The group will travel to Masaya, Nicaragua from December 11-23 and learn about North-South relations; work alongside members of the Monimbo Indigenous Movement; live at the hammock cooperative; visit an organic farm, a pottery cooperative, and the Laguna de Apoyo (site of the 2000 earthquake); and talk with community organizers working to address social justice problems at the grassroots level. . Any Ohio State University student is eligible to apply; however, students must enroll in CS 694 in autumn 2008. Students will earn five credits for CS 694, Development Theory and five credits for CS 498.02, Nicaraguan Service Learning. While Spanish language proficiency is helpful, it is not required. The cost of the trip will include Ohio State tuition plus a $1,060 program fee. An automatic Newark campus student travel grant of $300 is available. For more information, please visit http://newark.osu.edu/news/default.asp?intArticleId=621&intCategoryId=34 or contact Professor Katherine Borland (borland.19@osu.edu).
Comparative Studies 706 Complex Ethnography
Instructor: Prof. Tanya Erzen
T 1:30-4:18
# 05933-6
This seminar provides an opportunity for graduate students to develop their own research projects in a collaborative, collegial, and challenging atmosphere. We will discuss and practice a number of ethnographic research methods; but equally importantly, we will focus on how to conceptualize our objects of research. In particular, we will examine the function of ethnographic fieldwork when our research subjects are also our interlocutors and collaborators in the production of knowledge. What does ethnography look like when the "field" is not bounded clearly? How might we ethnographically approach research problems that span several sites, or that seem intangible? How can we track in everyday life the workings of global capital, the increasing flows of bodies and information, and the accelerating transformations in biomedicine, media, and information technologies? How do we tie the specifics of our research to broader questions or concerns? We'll address such questions in conceptual and concrete ways, through readings by anthropologists concerned with refining ethnographic method after anthropology's reflexive turn, as well as through field projects tied to students' own research interests. Depending on student interest, the readings may address a wide range of topics, from diasporic communities to disability, to biomedicine and religion, to militarization and the commodification of culture. The readings will also demonstrate a variety of approaches to ethnography, from poetics, to politics, to life histories, to multi-sited strategies.
English 792 Theories of Myth
Instructor: Prof. Merrill Kaplan
TR 1:30-3:18
# 09289-2
Stories about gods, stories about how to world came to be in the form it is now, stories set before the beginning of time or at the end of time—myth is a major genre of traditional narrative, and every human society has myths. How did they start? What is the relationship between myth and religion? How is it that so many myths are so similar even though they come from wildly different places? Are they literature? What do they mean, and how can we analyze them? This course is about how to think about myth and how myth is good to think with. Students will become familiar with the major theories and theorists of myth and bring them to bear on Norse, Greco-Roman, and other world mythologies. The subject matter will be of interest to students of folklore, religion, and ancient literatures, among others. Assigned books will include Theories of Mythology (Eric Csapo), Sacred Narrative (ed. Alan Dundes), Ovid’s Metamorphases, and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda. Shorter readings will be made available online.
EDU T&L 905: Ethnography of Communication
Instructor: Prof. Marcia Farr
M 4:30-6:48
# 08670-2
This two-quarter course introduces the Ethnography of Communication as a field of research. During the first quarter, we learn about the theoretical assumptions and conceptual frameworks used in this kind of research, as well as the various methods for both gathering and analyzing data. Basically, researchers in this field study language in its social and cultural contexts—and this includes both oral and written language. Thus it is useful for educational researchers concerned with literacy, and with the inter-relationships of orality and literacy in daily practice across diverse populations, who each have their own ways with (oral and written) words.
During the first quarter, students select a topic, and population, for research and then critically review available literature on that topic and population, as well as identify a research site. During the second quarter, students pursue their own research in settings within Central Ohio. (Selected students can negotiate drafting a proposal for dissertation research instead, or developing a pilot project prior to actual dissertation research.)
