Future Course Offerings
Spring 2009 Folklore Courses
Watch this page for updated information!English 270: Introduction to Folklore
Instructor: Martha Sims
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.
English 367.05: The US Folk Experience
Instructor: TBA
An intermediate course that extends and refines expository writing and analytical reading skills, introducing fieldwork and ethnographic approaches to the diversity of US folk culture.
English 577.03: Traditional Ballads
Instructor: Richard Firth Green
This course will study development of the traditional folk ballad from its origins in the European Middle Ages down to its continuing presence in contemporary North America. The primary focus will be thematic (Tragic Ballads, Supernatural Ballads, Outlaw Ballads, Humorous Ballads, etc), but there will some opportunity to discuss the traditional ballad in relation to related types like the broadside, and the literary ballad. There will be a strong emphasis upon the ballad in performance throughout, and wherever possible the ballad tunes will also be included.
English 597.01: Disability and Stigma in Everyday Life
GEC Capstone
Instructor: Amy Shuman
Erving Goffman defined stigma as the management of spoiled identity. We will look at how disability is represented in folklore, literature, and the media to understand how stigmas are constructed and how they are refuted or changed.
English 597.02: American Regional Cultures and Global Transition: Appalachia, Louisiana, and the Texas Border Country
GEC Capstone
Instructor: Ray Cashman
This course introduces you to the folklore of three American regions. Imagined as different from a supposed American norm, each region is both attractive to outsiders and stigmatized by them. In each region, a dynamic vernacular culture has emerged out of complex race and class relations. In each region, both government policy and economic forces have powerfully transformed local lifeways and the physical environment, and vernacular political expression has been subject to violent repression. Each region has also been strongly marked by in- and out-migration. We'll look at historical change through the prism of celebrated folklore forms such as Louisiana Mardi Gras, Appalachian fairy tales, and the Tex-Mex corrido. We'll also explore the impact of recent events: Hurricane Katrina and the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, mountaintop-removal mining in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, and the proposed border fence across the US-Mexican border to halt undocumented migration.
English 790: Poetics, Signs, and Symbols: From Formalism to Structuralism and Semiotics in Narrative and Visual Culture
Instructor: Amy Shuman
English 770.02: Intro to Graduate Studies in Folklore: Field Research
Instructor: Ray Cashman
This course explores a range of methodological, theoretical, and ethical issues in fieldwork as practiced in folklore and allied fields of ethnographic research. Students will take turns leading discussion of class readings. Equal emphasis will fall on students applying perspectives, methods, and strategies from readings and discussion in a series of hands-on exercises that will include participant-observation out in the world and face-to-face interviewing of other living, breathing homo sapiens (no auto-ethnography or internet research allowed). Written work for the course will consist of reports based on these empirical projects of gathering, documenting, and analyzing folklore materials.
Comparative Studies 770.04 Folklore in the History of Disciplines
Instructor: Sabra Webber
This is a foundational course for graduate studies in folklore, but also offers students in related fields of anthropology, socio-linguistics, and studies of religion, literature, science, and psychoanalysis insight into the ways that their disciplines, as well, were shaped by and shaped nineteenth century phenomena such as colonialism, nationalism, industrialization, spiritualism, and romanticism. Folkloristics today continues to draw upon these other co-emergent disciplines, and those disciplines, in turn, draw upon "traditional" expressive culture genres and indicators for data, for inspiration, and for resources upon which to draw in order to inject rhetorical power into their theoretical discourses. There are at least three foci of this seminar: First, how can we re-think the effects of the scholarly energy of the nineteenth century, especially in Western Europe, more complexly and less stereotypically? Certain "givens" of that period need to be re-examined by broadening geographically and in terms of social roles, races, genders and classes the spectrum of where what we now think of as folklore was studied and by whom. Second, what kinds of scholarly and societal "underpinnings" did folklore and the other emerging disciplines share—not only those of empire, but of a "classical" education, of politics, of travel habits, of missionary and military endeavors, of theories of race, class, and gender. Especially we will investigate how these theoretical assumptions were being troubled, and by whom. Where were the loci of tensions, especially in 19th century Britain and other Western European venues, and how did these translate over into early studies of folklore in the US. Third, how were the relationships between the armchair students of the practices of the folk and the "other," whether of verbal art genres, material culture, body art, dance, music, rituals or festivals negotiated with those who conducted field studies? And, How did those dedicated to the archeological past or the geographic present, relate to those dedicated to the study of what Sir Richard Burton’s nemesis, John Hanning Speke, referred to disdainfully as those (like Burton) fascinated by the "manners and customs" of global inhabitants of their 19th century world?
English 870: The Ethnography of Performance
Instructor: Dorothy Noyes
Since the 1970s, the performance turn in folklore, anthropology, and related disciplines has illuminated our understanding of agency and efficacy in cultural production. In a major revision of the modern culture concept, it focuses on cultural forms as process and practice: not texts exemplifying a static shared worldview but historically situated, conventional transactions among persons. As part of the philosophy of language's critique of reference, it 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. Today it is newly relevant as a corrective to the mystique of "values" and/or identities in contemporary cultural politics. This seminar, one of the three core theory courses in the graduate folklore curriculum, 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 self together in the attempt to illustrate common issues and a general paradigm.
Students will share in preparing for discussion and write a research paper: literary and historical topics are welcome as well as field-based projects.
