Alan Dundes

Sacred Narrative. Readings in the Theory of Myth

Alan Dundes defines myth as a sacred narrative that explains how the world and humanity came to be in their present form. This new volume brings together classics statements on the theory of myth by authors such as William Bascom, Jan de Vries, G. S. Kirk, James G. Frazer, Theodor H. Gaster, Mircea Eliade, Bronislaw Malinowski, C. G. Jung, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Rather than limiting this collection to classical Roman and Greek mythology, Dundes gives the book a worldwide scope. The twenty-two essays by leading experts on myth represent comparative functionalist, myth-ritual, Jungian, Freudian, and structuralist approaches to studying the genre.

Mother wit from the laughing barrel : readings in the interpretation of Afro-American folklore

Exploring the scope, diversity, and vitality of black culture, here is a fascinating collection of more than sixty articles from some of the most perceptive and authoritative commentators upon the black experience--Zora Neale Hurston, J. Mason Brewer, Sterling A. Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, Willis Laurence James, John Lovell Jr., Langston Hughes, Charles W. Chesnutt, Alan Lomax, Ralph Ellison, A. Philip Randolph, Newbell Niles Puckett, Roger D. Abrahams, and many others. Readers cannot help coming away from this book with a new appreciation of the nature and richness of African American folklore. For those with little or no previous knowledge of this heterogeneous and spellbinding lore Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel will be an eye-opening encounter. Drawn out of the deep, rich well of African American culture, these essays convey the import of the black folk experience for all Americans. No library or individual with a serious interest in African American folklore should fail to own this remarkable anthology.

Little Red Riding Hood : a casebook

Alan Dundes continues his exploration of well-loved fairy tales with this casebook on one of the best-known of them all: Little Red Riding Hood. Following versions of the tale by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, the essays by an international group of scholars provide an impressive cross-section of theoretical approaches.

Thinking Ahead: A Folkloristic Reflection of the Future Orientation in American Worldview

In examining the possibility of extrapolating features of worldview from folkloristic data, the author considers the allegation that Americans are future oriented in the light of various examples of American folklore. Numerous proverbs, greetings, folk metaphors and other traditional oral formulas seem to reveal both a penchant for looking ahead and a reluctance to look back. The evidence cited includes contrasts between future and past oriented societies: All Saints Day celebrates figures of the past while cognate Haloween is for children (future); divination in Africa often concerns finding past causes for present crises whereas divination in America predicts future events from present signs; past oriented societies have myths (set in the past) while Americans have science fiction (set in the future). The pattern permeates research insofar as scholars tend to write the conclusions/ends of their papers first.

The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation

of those within tend to divide folklorists into literary or anthropological categories. With this binary division comes a related notion that each group of folklorists has its own methodology appropriate for its special interests; hence there is thought to be a method for studying folklore in literature and another method for studying folklore in culture. Looking at this dichotomy from the viewpoint of a professional folklorist, one can see that it is false; moreover it is a dichotomy whose unfortunate persistence has tended to divide unnecessarily scholars working on similar if not identical problems. The basic methodology of studying folklore in literature and studying folklore in culture is almost exactly the same; in other words, the discipline of folklore has its own methodology applying equally well to literary and cultural problems. There are only two basic steps in the study of folklore in literature and in culture. The first step is objective and empirical; the second is subjective and speculative. The first might be termed identification and the second interpretation. Identification essentially consists of a search for similarities; interpretation depends upon the delineation of differences. The first task in studying an item is to show how it is like previously reported items, whereas the second is to show how it differs from previously reported items-and, hopefully, why it differs. Professional folklorists who are usually skilled in the mechanics of identification are apt to criticize literary critics and cultural anthropologists for failing to properly identify folkloristic materials before commenting upon their use. And folklorists are quite right to do so. Naive analyses can result from inadequate or inaccurate identification. Plots of traditional tale types might be falsely attributed to individual writers; European themes in a European tale told by American Indians might be mistakenly considered to be aboriginal elements. However, folklorists themselves might be criticized for doing no more than identifying. Too many studies of folklore in literature consist of little more than reading novels for the motifs or the proverbs, and no attempt is made to evaluate how an author has used folkloristic elements and more specifically, how these folklore elements function in the particular literary work as a whole. Similarly, listing the European tales among the North American Indians does not in itself explain how the borrowed tale functions in its new environment. The concern of folklorists with identification has resulted in sterile study of folklore for folklores sake and it is precisely this emphasis on text and neglect of context which estranged so many literary critics and cultural anthropologists. The text-withoutcontext orientation is exemplified by both anthropological and literary folklore scholarship. Folklorists go into the field to return with texts collected without their cultural context; folklorists plunge into literary sources and emerge with dry lists of motifs or proverbs lifted from their literary context. The problem is that for many folklorists identification has become an end in itself instead of a means to the end of interpretation. Identification is only the beginning, only the first step. A folklorist

International folkloristics : classic contributions by the founders of folklore

Chapter 1 Circular Concerning the Collecting of Folk Poetry Chapter 2 Folk-Lore and the Origin of the Word Chapter 3 Request Chapter 4 An Angel Flew Through the Room Chapter 5 The Study of Folk-Lore Chapter 6 The Method of Julius Krohn Chapter 7 The Message of the Folk-Lorist Chapter 8 On the Need for a Bibliography of Folklore Chapter 9 A Dialogue in Gyergyo-Kilenyfalva Chapter 10 In Search of Folktales and Songs Chapter 11 Epic Laws of Folk Narrative Chapter 12 The Rites of Passage Chapter 13 The Principles of Sympathetic Magic Chapter 14 The Structure of Russian Fairy Tales Chapter 15 Observations on Folklore Chapter 16 Geography and Folk-Tale Oicotypes Chapter 17 Irish Tales and Story-Tellers Chapter 18 Symbolism in Dreams Chapter 19 Wedding Ceremonies in European Folklore Chapter 20 Strategy in Counting Out: An Ethnographic Folklore Field Study Chapter 21 Suggestions for Further Reading in the History of Folkloristics.

Fire in the dragon and other psychoanalytic essays on folklore

The only Freudian to have been originally trained in folklore and the first phsychoanalytic anthropologist to carry out fieldwork, Geza Roheim (1891-1953) contributed susbstantially to the worldwide study of cultures. Combining a global perspective with encyclopedic knowledge of ethnographic sources, this Hungarian analyst demonstrates the validity of Freudian theory in both Western and non-Western settings. These 17 essays, written between 1922 and 1953, are among Roheims most significant published writings and are collected here for the first time to introduce a new generation of readers to his unique interpretation of myths, folktales, and legends. From Australian aboriginal mythology to Native American trickster tales, from the Grimm folktale canon to Hungarian folk belief, Roheim explores a wide range of issues, such as the relationship of dreams to folklore and the primacy of infantile conditioning in the formation of adult fantasy. An introduction by folklorist Alan Dundes describes Roheims career, and each essay is prefaced by a brief consideration of its intellectual and bibliographical context.

Much ado about sweet bugger all: Getting to the bottom of a puzzle in British folk speech

One of the lexical items differentiating British English from American English is the word bugger. Popular in England as attested by numerous idioms and its frequent occurrence in limericks, it is rarely used in the United States and if it is, it is without reference to its original sense of sodomy. It is suggested that this marked contrast in usage may possibly be related to different attitudes towards homosexuality existing in England and the United States.

The J. A. P. and the J. A. M. in American Jokelore

JEWISH FOLKLORE IS ENDLESSLY RICH and one large component of the Jewish folklore repertoire consists of jokes. Some have argued that the Jewish sense of humor, especially as revealed in jokes, has helped Jews survive centuries of anti-Semitic prejudice and discrimination which in its extreme forms culminated in pogroms and the holocaust. If there is a proportional relationship between repression and jokes such that the greater the repression, the greater the number of jokes protesting that repression, one can even better understand why Jews have so long depended upon the defense mechanism ofjokes.

A pariah people : the anthropology of antisemitism

An anthropological study of antisemitism which identifies why strategies for normalising the status of Jews have failed. The role Jews historically played in Christian society is compared to that of the untouchables in India, with claims that the stigma has been reinforced through myth and art.