Joint Conferences of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) and the American Folklore Society (AFS), Miami, Florida, 19.–23.October 2016 (original) (raw)
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TFH: The Journal of History and Folklore, 2023
The 1930s, shaped by the hardships brought on by the Great De-pression, were also a time when folklore collecting was institution-alized. Anthropologists and ethnographers, who had developed new tools and perspectives to document culture and history in the 1920s, slipped into positions the New Deal had opened for officials and di-rectors in the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), which was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Their aim was to re-write American history to give new self-respect and -understanding to a na-tion struggling with the effects of dramatic economic changes. They collected narratives of “ordinary people,” wanting to do justice to the diversity of American society. Oral and cultural history methods were at the center of their practice. The FWP also funded local and regional projects devoted to the documentation of Black culture and history, often carried out by units of Black writers, and interviewed about 2,300 ex-slaves. African American writers belonged to the group hit hardest by the economic collapse. Among them were three women writers: Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and Zora Neale Hurston. These women conducted interviews, collected folklore, wrote and edited manuscripts, and used both their time in and material from the FWP for their own fiction. In this way, narratives of Black female subjectivity made it into literature and history, with women writing Black female voices and heroines into the historical narrative of the United States by revising, transforming, and subverting traditional codes and genres. Margaret Walker’s folk ballad “Yalluh Hammuh” can be seen as such a venture. It also exemplifies the interplay of per- sonal memory, folklore, and poetry. An examination of the use of oral history and folklore in the New Deal era, with a focus on the voices and roles of African American women, can help us better understand the nexus of “race,” class, and gender within literature, poetry, and historiography.
Folk and Literary Narrative in a Postmodern Context: The Case of theMärchen
Fabula, 1988
The Gase of the Märchen * Fairy-tales "are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them" r. _. JackZipes A colleague reads my essay on postmodern revisions of Snow White (AaTh 709) and asks: "Are you officiating over the funeral rites of a genre which, lifted out of the nexus of oral circulation, gets caught up in the self-reflexive-intertextual-structurations of postmodernism?" "Am I?" I ask myself. A TV commercial reminds me that "Once upon a time, it was easy to be a consumer .. .* I wake up to the merry, carefree voice of Goldilocks on the radio: her gold bank card has allowed her to pay off the bears' hospitality. In an interview, Margaret Atwood states that folk and fairy tales are, like biblical stories and Greek myths, the foundations of the Western Imagination; hasn't Robert Coover said that too? And what about John Barth? The magazine Heavy Metal features the grotesque tale of "Snow Whitish (she's a little off-color 'cause she's got a cold).* Italo Calvino's posthumous, incomplete, and untranslated collection on the five senses has us overhearing a fairy tale king's hearing problems ... On the box of a Japanese product which soothes minor pain and itch, Snow White bends over her little friends protectively, a good mother with the best lotion at hand. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical "Into the Woods," an amusing and fearless contemporary look at fairy tales, is quite a success in New York City. Angela Carter's revision of Perrault's fairy tales sells well in England: L•! contes du temps passe become, äs the title of her collection indicates, a contemporary Bloody Cbamber where we lie "In the Company of Wolves." Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 1987 American Folklore Society meeting in Albuquerque, N. Mex. and at the 1987 Modern Languages Association convention in San Francisco, Calif.