"How can I recall a thing that I have forgotten" Story and memories in folklore fieldwork notes in Serbia (original) (raw)
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Personalia in Folklore: Oral personal narrative as a folkloristic sub-genre
The traditional concept for Folklore as collective inheritance without a single author has been shaken by the sub-genre of oral prose – the oral personal narrative. This oral narrative which is based on personal oral testimony of a narrator, who claims to have been originally involved in the events and who narrates his personal experience without traditional content and without hiding the identity, needs different treatment in comparison with previous folkloristic genres and sub-genres. Life stories, oral autobiographies, or whether only the oral testimonies, are not only products of our experiences that go through our memory and reevaluation, but are also works of art. We during daily communication, while expressing our daily experiences, use the narrative techniques, forms and stylistic figures that make these oral narratives a complex oral genre. On oral narrative genres important contribution gave Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, William Labov & Joshua Waletzky, Linda Dégh, Sandra Dolby Stahl, Annikki Kaivola - Bregenhoj, , Barbro Klein, Anne Heimo etc., who helped for conceptualizing the new sub-genre in oral narrative called Oral Personal Narrative, as a single unit (Sandra Dolby Stahl). This sub-genre, even that not with this name – the oral personal narrative – was treated also from folklorists of the region, taking in consideration work of Maja Bošković Stulli and Mirna Velčić, as well as Albanian folklorists from Kosovo and Albania. In this paper, we will bring theoretical concepts and thoughts, pro et contra, that faced Folkloristics, for formulating the definition of the oral personal narrative in Albanian speaking Folkloristic, as well.
Arv Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 2010, Special Issue on MEMORY
Special issue of ARV on Memory, Memory studies and Cultural Memory. Edited by Henning Laugerud. In various forms, the perspective of memory has held a central position in many areas of cultural-historical research since the beginning of the twentieth century. This perspective is, however, part of a long and complex tradition. The theme of this issue of Arv is also memory, but in this yearbook, the focus is slightly shifted in relation to the earlier research interest in the collective, or the supra-individual memory. In this collection of contributions, the perspective – to a greater degree, but not solely – will be to look at memory as something both individual and collective, and the way in which the “individual” and the “collective” can be said to meet – not always without resistance – in memory. Reflections on memory, its art, meaning and significance, has a long tradition going back to antiquity, also in matters concerning human knowledge and understanding of culture. We shall attempt to encircle the subject through a series of concrete examples from Antiquity, the Middle Ages and early modern times up to our near past, taken from the historic empirical material, where the examples also will serve as exempla in the classical rhetorical sense – namely as exemplary.
Memory and Local Stories: Sources of History and Knowledge
We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left now. To reclaim the realms of Memory, many countries have invested heavily in memory sites, such as monuments, museums, archives, and others though they can never replace the lost memory. But, they are just another way to refresh and nourish our memory of the past. In this context, oral history that touches particularly on topics scarcely touched in the available history books is important, especially oral history preservation that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials, whatever format they may be in is essential. Using interviews with living survivors, this method of historical documentation can fill in gaps of records that make up early historical documents. This method of collecting oral history through memory is getting popular the world over thinking that much of local history and wisdom and knowledge and other cultural memories would vanish with the loss of elders who were willing to preserve and pass along. what they knew. With the advent of writing
Literary stories: cultural memory
2017
Historical and cultural memory is put into practice through narratives. As a narrative medium, literature plays an important role in the process of transformation of the past events in cultural memory. This transformation includes critical reflection or affirmation of various aspects of memory and its social context. Literary texts in this paper include short stories of Jan Drda, Josef Škvorecký and Zdeněk Rotrekl which deal with the final days of the World War Two. We never get closer to the truth than in a novel. Louis Begley. Between Fact and Fiction (Zwischen Fakten und Fiktionen, Frankfurt am Main 2008) Memory in Cultural Studies The words ‘memory’ and ‘trauma’ appear in semantic nuances and various contexts of everyday speech fairly often1. Serving their own purposes and agenda, politics and official power discourse tend to remember some historical events and forget others. But what do the notions of memory and trauma mean from 1) Terms like memory (and remembrance) are now us...
In a foreshortening problems of memory are considered features of a fi rst-person narration in stories of the Ossetian writer S.Z. Khugayev, are investigated specifi cs of communication of a narrator and its reviewers («I» am a storyteller and «I» am a characters), levels of narrative competences of subjects of speech. The analysis of the texts which has been carried out with a support on conceptual and theoretical ideas and provisions, stated in works of domestic scientists and western narrators’ researchers, gave the chance to raise also the questions of intra text and extra text interaction of narrative instances; there is presented the classifi cation of first-person narratives types in S.Z. Khugayev’s small prose. Activization of «I»-narrative forms in creativity of writer and in whole Ossetian literature is treated in article as an echo of the «Thaw» years stimulated revaluation of values in public consciousness and caused by this interest to internal life of an individual in its ethnomental determinacy. Keywords: Ossetian literature, S.Z. Khugayev’s stories, narrative of memory, narration diegetique, intra text instances, subject and speech plan, implied reader, ethnomentality, invariant narrative model.
The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, 2015
Memory" and "narrative" are technical terms in the academic fields of psychology, linguistics, communication, history, and literary studies, with a variety of definitions in each field, in addition to their nontechnical uses. Additionally, they are also common terms used nontechnically in everyday language. This situation leads to a range of overlapping and sometimes opposing definitions. What remains stable throughout this range of usages is that both "memory" and "narrative" describe ways that an individual or a group represents a version of the past in the present, often for the purpose of shaping a desired future. Most research on narrative within linguistics and psychology consists of studies of personal oral narratives of events that are to be understood as true, rather than on the complex artistic constructions of imaginary events in novels, movies, and video games. The term "memory" is most commonly used, but "remembering" is a better description of the act of using language to represent the past. Remembering is an act; memory is a term that describes either an ability or a storehouse. Whatever the neurological basis of memory may be, as soon as a story or other account of the past is produced, for an audience, or for the rememberer alone, an act of remembering is happening. Indeed, the specific meanings of "memory" and "remember" are particular to English. While all languages have terms for the act of representing the past in the present, the range of what they describe and their connotations differ widely (Wierzbicka, 2007). Discussions of memory may focus on the past of an individual or a group, but in fact memory in narrative is necessarily social. Stories are typically told to someone: The act of narration assumes an audience. There are some genres, like diaries, that are, or pretend to be, for the writer alone, but even in diaries there is a split between the person writing the account of the immediate past or present, and the imagined later self who will read it. Both narrative and memory are constructed. Memories of what is understood to be the same event change over time, as the person changes, and in response to the responses of audiences for the story. Both children and adults learn what is memorable as they learn what can be, or should be told as a story, and how it may and may not be told to particular audiences. This kind of learning is part of the process of identity construction.
Identity and language – as reflected in the mirror of folk tale traditions in the Carpathian Basin
The scrutiny of folk tales and identity cannot be considered complete without a joint reconsideration of the problems of the Hungarian folktale corpus and language. Earlier research considered the linguistic formation, vocabulary, and idiosyncrasies derived from possible regionalisms or linguistic-aesthetic adaptations to be separable from the content elements inherent in texts, whether they be ethnographical, mythological, or ancient religious texts, or else deep psychological images and allusions. This kind of separation made the multiple interpretation of tales possible; however, it also appears to hide something: tales primarily exist as linguistic phenomena, we encounter them as such in their colloquial or written versions.
Tales we tell are tales we dwell. The tale between belief-tale and fairytale
2013
This study represents the promised ‘half’ of elaboration over the fictionalization square, a common ground achievement, as early as the year 2000, stemmed from the common work, archival, theoretical and in the field, with Bogdan Neagota, whose own ‘half’ mirrors mine in the pages of this volume. I have developed it into the triangle of the narrative continuum of the tale of oral tradition, aligning what I had identified as the four degrees of memorata, and directing their extremes, i.e. the belief-tale in the first person and the description, into the fairytale, as the most complex narrative genre to be found within folkloric cultures like our own. The criterion I used is the temporal development of the narrated plot: the tense of the tale is elucidating, for all the folding and unfolding processes of the narrative nucleus during transmission. Traditional transmission of cultural facts is narrative as well as syntactic, so that the tales being told as folk-lore are, for their storytellers, vehicles and modes of enactment of communication requirements, both of their groups and of their own.