All graduate courses count towards
the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization (GIS) in Folklore.
Spring 2015 Graduate Courses
Graduate/ Undergraduate Combined Courses
Sami Culture Yesterday and Today- Scandvn 5151
Dr. Merrill Kaplan
T/Th 2:00-3:30,Hagertu Hall 145
Floklore Major/ Minor Core Elective for Undergrads/ GIS Topics for Grads
#32010
Interdisciplinary study of S·mi (Lapp) people of Scandinavia past and present. Indigenous modes of expression and worldview, contemporary cultural and political activism. Extensive discussion of connections to Native American and Inuit experiences; rise of US and other indigenous peoplesí movements.
Prereq: Permission of instructor (for undergraduates). Repeatable to a maximum of 12 cr hrs.
Comparative Folklore: Approaches to Festival and Festival Forms- COMPSTD 5957.01
Dr. Katherine Borland
WeFr 2:20PM - 3:40PM Hagerty Hall 0259
Folklore Major/ Minor Core Elective for Undergrads and GIS Topics for Grads
#25618/ 25617
Festival, Dance, Sport, Pilgrimage, Ritual Enactment, Street Drama, and Protest are complex, collective, embodied, artistic expressions worth studying comparatively. As sites of popular celebration, arenas of conflict, opportunities both for commerce and for intense interpersonal or religious identification, they provide rich folkloric texts for interpretation and analysis. In this course we will sample the ethnographic record of collective performances as we tackle a broad range of theories about and approaches to the study of people in motion including but not limited to: myth-ritual, collective effervescence, safety valve, place-making, symbolic inversion, collective reflexivity, semiotics, phenomenology, restored behavior, communitas, boundary marking and maintenance, play theory, performativity/theatricality, conflict, flow.
The course is run as a seminar. In addition to reading and discussing interpretive approaches to popular movement, students will take responsibility for surveying and presenting new work on their chosen cultural tradition. Students are expected to pursue independent research throughout the term, culminating in a paper and class presentation that frames their research within at least one of the analytic or interpretive approaches we have studied in class. Our class goal will be to develop a comparative framework for understanding the socially and historically contextualized studies students bring to the table through their research.
How do we generate evidence to address our research questions? What are the advantages and pitfalls of specific approaches? This course is designed to explore these and other questions relating to how we create and interpret data in/from the “field” – that complex social, environmental and political space in which we learn firsthand about the world. Students will critique and practice interviewing, participant observation and ethnography, visual techniques, questionnaire surveys, archival research, landscape interpretation and more. We will discuss overarching themes such as reflexivity, representation, power, ethics and activism. Graduate students in any field who are planning to conduct primary research on human/social phenomena are welcome.
For those concentrating in Folklore, this course can substitute for CS/Eng 6751.02 Fieldwork and the Ethnography of Speaking (which we are not able to offer next term).
Theorizing Folklore I: Tradition and Transmission- ENG 7350.01/ ENG 7350.11 / COMPSTD 7350.01
Dr. Ray Cashman
Tu 9:10AM - 12:10PM Denney Hall 0435
GIS Theory for Grads
COMPSTD 7350.01 #30515/ ENG 7350.01 #30911/ ENG 7350.11# 30912
This course is one of the core graduate seminars for those interested in theory and research methodology in folklore studies. We will examine the centrality of tradition as a concept in the field of folklore studies and more broadly in academic and nonacademic spheres. We will review theories of how cultural forms travel through time and space, across social networks, suspended in a tension between conservation and innovation. Key concepts and topics include diffusion and the comparative method, theories of oral transmission and orality, commemoration and memory studies, traditionalization and invented traditions.
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 792 or English 870.
Studies in the English Language- Discourse Analysis: Social Contexts - ENGLISH 7872.01/ .02
Dr. Gabriella Modan
We 9:10AM - 12:10PM,Denney Hall 0245
GIS Topics for Grads
#18674/18675
For students interested in examining discourse as part of a folklore, linguistics, literature, social science, or humanities research project, this course will give you the tools to investigate how language structure (not just content) shapes perceptions, values, social interaction, and power struggles. The course provides an overview of the major approaches to analyzing spoken and written discourse used in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, including interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, and critical discourse analysis. We will explore how the contexts of various spheres of social interaction both shape and are shaped by discourse that occurs in or in relation to them. The approach that we will take to analyzing texts is a micro-level, hands-on one; we'll read the classic articles and use data collected by students to examine how the details of linguistic structure connect to more macro spheres of social engagement. Students will collect examples of spoken and written texts, and analyze them in short paper assignments.
REQUIREMENTS: transcription assignment, 3 short papers, one final project.
If you have any questions or would like some more information about the course, please feel free to email me at modan.1@osu.edu
Prereq: 771 or Linguist 601, or equiv, and permission of instructor. Not open to students with 10 qtr cr hrs for 872 or 6 sem cr hrs for 7872.01 or 7872.02. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.
Seminar in Disability Studies- ENG 7891.01/ 7891.02
Dr. Amy Shuman
Fr 9:10AM - 12:10PM, Scott Lab E0241
GIS Topics for Grads
#30921/30922
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Not open to students with 20 qtr cr hrs for 891 or 12 sem cr hrs for 7891.01 or 7891.02.
Autumn 2015 Graduate Courses
Graduate/ Undergraduate Combined Courses
Studies in Orality and Literacy- Comparative Studies 5668/NELC 5568
Dr. Sabra Webber
Th 4:00PM - 6:45PM Hagerty Hall 451
#32647/ #32646
Examination of major theories of writing and of oral composition and transmission, in juxtaposition to case material deriving from a variety of Middle Eastern and Western studies.
Sample Texts: Joyce Coleman, “Orality and Literacy,” Walter Ong “Digitization Ancient and Modern,” Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “The Origins of Writing,” David Carr, “Torah on the Heart,” Anna Davies, “Forms of Writing in the Ancient Mediterranean World,” Konrad Hirschler, “Literacy, Orality, Aurality,” and “The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands,” Roman Jakobson "Roman Grammatical Parallelism & Its Russian Facet," Susan Niditch “New Ways of Thinking About Orality and Literacy,” Sabra Webber “Canonicity and Middle Eastern Folk Literature,” James C. Scott, Ch. 6 ½ “ Orality, Writing and Texts” IN The Art of Not Being Governed, Salem/Pax, Elaine Richardson and Sean Lewis "'Flippin’ the Script' / 'Blowin’ Up the Spot': Puttin’ Hip-Hop Online in (African) America and South Africa"
Prereq: Not open to students with credit for 648, or NELC 5568 (648).
Comparative Folklore: Folklore and Gender- Comparative Studies 5957.01
Dr. Katherine Borland
Tu 10:00AM - 12:45PM Hagerty Hall 451
#32623/ #32626
This course explores folklore from a gendered, feminist lens and feminist theory from a folkloristic lens in order highlight the unique contributions of feminist folklorists and folkloristics to our understanding of expressive culture. We will engender key terms and definitions even as we challenge existing categories of folklore scholarship. We will recognize women’s expressive practices and the conditions of their concealment, recuperating along the way the voices of our scholarly foremothers. We will complicate concepts of genre, performance, tradition and ethnography by applying the gendered lens. Feminism pushes the study of folklore toward an investigation of the politics of culture. We will trace that trajectory in our survey of the field, exploring along the way female adventurers and murdered girls in ballads, feminist fairytale revisions, lorena bobbit jokes and southern women’s bawdy humor, bodylore, foodways, dance traditions and the intimate dance of culture on/in/and by women.
Prereq: 2350, 2350H, English 2270, or 2270H (270). Not open to students with maximum qtr cr hrs for 677.01 and 677.02. Repeatable to a maximum of 6 cr hrs.
The Anthropology of Food: Culture, Society and Eating- Anthropology 5624
Dr. Jeffrey H. Cohen
TuTh 12:45PM - 2:05PM McPherson Lab 1021
#33291/ #33292
Explores food traditions, global expansion of foods and the production/exchange of food in culture and society.
Prereq: 2200 (200), 2201 (201), or 2202 (202), or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 620.08.
Graduate Course
Theorizing Folklore II: The Ethnography of Performance- English 7350.02/ English 7350.22/ Comparative Studies 7350.02
Dr. Dorothy Noyes
Th 9:10AM - 12:10PM Denney Hall 419
Graduate Theory for GIS
#32879/ #32880/ #32884
Since the 1970s, the performance turn in folklore, anthropology, and related disciplines has illuminated our understanding of agency and efficacy in everyday life as well as specialized cultural production. In a major revision of the modern culture concept, the performance approach focuses on cultural forms as process and practice: not texts instantiating a static shared worldview but historically situated, conventional transactions among persons. As part of the reaction to a linguistic ideology privileging reference, the performance approach looks at how language is used to construct reality; reacting to the focus on deep structure in most grand theory, it insists on the significance of material and interactional surfaces. With its attention to bodies in motion, it remains relevant as a corrective to the reification of values and identities in contemporary cultural politics.
This seminar will examine both programmatic texts and selected case studies in the ethnography of performance: that is, an approach based in "thick description" of instances. While theory in the field has tended to develop within genre specializations, we will examine verbal art, cultural performance (ritual, festival, spectacle) and the performance of selfhood together in the attempt to illustrate common issues and a general paradigm. Students will share in preparing for discussion and write a research paper. This course fulfills the core theory requirement of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Folklore. (For more information, seehttp://cfs.osu.edu/programs/graduate-options/gis-graduate-curriculum .)
Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for English 870.
The Center for Folklore Studies coordinates folklore course offerings across departments, available both as individual electives and as part of the undergraduate and graduate programs. Peruse our undergraduate and graduate course offerings for this semester, and look at our course archives (in the column to the right) for more information about regularly offered classes. 5000-level courses are open to both graduate and undergraduate students without special permission. Graduate students interested in lower-level courses may consult the relevant professor regarding alternative possibilities for enrollment.
Visit buckeyelink to register for folklore courses.