THE POST-FOLKLORE EPIC CHRONICLE: A GENRE ON THE BORDER AND THE BORDERS OF THE GENRE (Summary in English) (original) (raw)

2016, Belgrade: Institute for Literature and Arts, Cigoja

The terminology and the concepts used to define the post-folklore epic chronicle in this study are based on those developed in some of the papers studying Serbian and Croatian folklore. The terms folk song/singing (песма/ певање на народну), popular folk songs (народске песме), popular culture genres (пучка књижевност), wild literature and folklorism are critically analysed. The (re)definition of the field and the subject matter of folklore studies is also discussed, as well as the concepts tradition, folklore and community, among others. In this study, the term post-folklore (Neklyudov 1995) has been modified to exclude strict chronological determinants, and has been preferred to the term књижевност/literature (from the syntagm пучка књижевност/popular culture genres and књижевни фолклор/literary folklore), so as to transfer the analysed phenomena from the narrower framework of literary heritage into a much wider domain. In addition to gaining a wider framework, by doing this, a possible devaluation of this creative tradition and its bearers (and in a wider sense, the related culture) is avoided. In this work, post-folklore is defined as a polycentric phenomenon, associated with the tradition of social groups (and individual tradition). This shift in emphasis, moving folklore in a wider cultural context, led to a consideration of the research into mass media and popular culture, so as to account for the multitudinous available range of communicative codes and mo- dels, modes of existence, transmission and reception. Thus, in this monograph the term post-folklore covers a cultural, aesthetic, structural and stylistic complex understood in the widest possible sense, a complex which functions as the signifier for a type of culture and/or of a verbal text. Consequently, certain issues regarding the transmission and reception of a post-folklore text have also been analysed. This analysis considers the epic tradition spanning two centuries, with the traditional signing accompanied by the gusle, and places particular emphasis on 20th century transformations resulting from the institutionalisation of the tradition and the introduction of the gusle into the world of the music industry, mass media and popular culture. While presenting the genre of the post-folklore epic, an overview of its relationship with other genres is also given. One such relationship is that with panegyric literature, which includes the so-called pesme budnice (wake-up-call songs whose purpose is to galvanize the addressees into joining the fight for a cause), laments and mourning songs. This analysis of genre encompasses the structural, stylistic and ideological levels. Special attention is devoted to the positioning of epic chronicles and laments within the tradition of political satire and the pamphlet. During their development, historic and documentary laments remained in contact with the semantic fields and pragmatic functions of epic chronicles, reflecting political and historical events and public and political personalities. In this way, these chronicles are related to the heritage of political satire and the pamphlet, but also to the tradition which gave rise to wake-up-call songs. Epic chronicles also share common ground with the tradition of mourning: the similarity between these genres is evident not only at the level of concepts, but also at the level of function (character glorification and the codification of memory), and even at the level of minimal magical formulative structures (e.g. glorification formulae and the alternation of toasts and curses). Within this work, the pragmatic analysis of genre is directed at the role of the post-folklore epic chronicle in the construction of the cultural and communicative memory of a community. Examination of the temporal planes in an epic text reveals the processes through which history is compressed and the past is idealised. as such, ahistoricism becomes a basic aspect of the epic projection of reality. The epic is a genre which connects individual and political memory, thematising the official, but also forbidden and suppressed memories, “great” and “small” histories. The epic chronicle, whether traditional oral or post-folklore, is also the first step (or attempt) in the transferral of events and personalities from the domain of biography into the domain of the cultural memory of a community. Therefore, chronicled singing about events from the recent past is not common property (as it is sometimes deemed to be), but is subject to reflection, evaluation, re-evaluation and dispute. Polemical discourse surrounding the post-folklore chronicle is registered and analysed on several levels – as scientific discourse, as a representation of the views of the tradition bearers and as public discourse in which the epic survives on the crossroads between national cultural heritage and the heritage of compromise. This research into the discourse is then profiled in relation to anthropological discussions regarding the ideology of the tradition. The concept of the ideology of the tradition is complementary to the concept of language ideology which is developed within the framework of anthropological linguistics. Ideology of the tradition comprises the study of the complex of positions and attitudes that are formulated and expressed about tradition. This is why individual understandings of epic tradition(s), the place tradition occupies in the creation of individual and collective identities, but also the researcher’s place in the ideology of tradition are all problematized in this book.