Genre ( French for 'kind, sort') is any style or form of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature , music , or other forms of art or entertainment, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand-alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed-upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may have rigid, strictly adhered-to guidelines, while others may show great flexibility. The proper use of a specific genre is important for important for a successful transfer of information ( media-adequacy ).
163-604: Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is very different from the vernacular usage of the term "myth" that refers to a belief that is not true. Instead, the veracity of a myth is not a defining criterion. Myths are often endorsed by secular and religious authorities and are closely linked to religion or spirituality . Many societies group their myths, legends, and history together, considering myths and legends to be factual accounts of their remote past. In particular, creation myths take place in
326-616: A moral , fable , allegory or a parable , or collection of traditional stories, understood to be false. It came eventually to be applied to similar bodies of traditional stories among other polytheistic cultures around the world. Thus "mythology" entered the English language before "myth". Johnson 's Dictionary , for example, has an entry for mythology, but not for myth. Indeed, the Greek loanword mythos ( pl. mythoi ) and Latinate mythus (pl. mythi ) both appeared in English before
489-448: A "disease of language". He speculated that myths arose due to the lack of abstract nouns and neuter gender in ancient languages. Anthropomorphic figures of speech , necessary in such languages, were eventually taken literally, leading to the idea that natural phenomena were in actuality conscious or divine. Not all scholars, not even all 19th-century scholars, accepted this view. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl claimed that "the primitive mentality
652-419: A "quantitative mining of the resulting archive, and extraction of distribution patterns in time and space". It is based on the assumption that every text artifact is a variant of the original text. As a proponent of this method, Walter Anderson proposed additionally a Law of Self-Correction, i.e. a feedback mechanism which would keep the variants closer to the original form. It was during the first decades of
815-458: A Linear World", Donald Fixico describes an alternate concept of time. "Indian thinking" involves "'seeing' things from a perspective emphasizing that circles and cycles are central to world and that all things are related within the Universe." He then suggests that "the concept of time for Indian people has been such a continuum that time becomes less relevant and the rotation of life or seasons of
978-448: A book on the comparative study of mythology and religion—argued that humans started out with a belief in magical rituals; later, they began to lose faith in magic and invented myths about gods, reinterpreting their rituals as religious rituals intended to appease the gods. Historically, important approaches to the study of mythology have included those of Vico , Schelling , Schiller , Jung , Freud , Lévy-Bruhl , Lévi-Strauss , Frye ,
1141-695: A context which is foreign to the original tradition." This definition, offered by the folklorist Hermann Bausinger, does not discount the validity of meaning expressed in these "second hand" traditions. Many Walt Disney films and products belong in this category of folklorism; fairy tales become animated film characters, stuffed animals and bed linens. These manifestations of folklore traditions have their own significance for their audience. Fakelore refers to artifacts which might be termed pseudo-folklore , manufactured items claiming to be traditional. The folklorist Richard Dorson coined this word, clarifying it in his book "Folklore and Fakelore". Current thinking within
1304-461: A culture, not just the oral traditions. Folk process is used to describe the refinement and creative change of artifacts by community members within the folk tradition that defines the folk process. Professionals within this field, regardless of the other words they use, consider themselves to be folklorists. Other terms which might be confused with folklore are popular culture and vernacular culture . However, pop culture tends to be in demand for
1467-503: A different direction. Throughout the 19th century folklore had been tied to romantic ideals of the soul of the people, in which folk tales and folksongs recounted the lives and exploits of ethnic folk heroes. Folklore chronicled the mythical origins of different peoples across Europe and established the beginnings of national pride . By the first decade of the 20th century there were scholarly societies as well as individual folklore positions within universities, academies, and museums. However,
1630-552: A difficult and painful discussion within the German folklore community. Following World War II, the discussion continued about whether to align folklore studies with literature or ethnology. Within this discussion, many voices were actively trying to identify the optimal approach to take in the analysis of folklore artifacts. One major change had already been initiated by Franz Boas. Culture was no longer viewed in evolutionary terms; each culture has its own integrity and completeness, and
1793-476: A failed or obsolete mode of thought, often by interpreting myth as the primitive counterpart of modern science within a unilineal framework that imagined that human cultures are travelling, at different speeds, along a linear path of cultural development. One of the dominant mythological theories of the latter 19th century was nature mythology , the foremost exponents of which included Max Müller and Edward Burnett Tylor . This theory posited that "primitive man"
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#17327724379471956-437: A life cycle of linear time (ex. baptisms, weddings, funerals). This needs to be expanded to other traditions of oral lore. For folk narrative is NOT a linear chain of isolated tellings, going from one single performance on our time-space grid to the next single performance. Instead it fits better into a non-linear system, where one performer varies the story from one telling to the next, and the performer's understudy starts to tell
2119-426: A limited time, mass-produced and communicated using mass media. Individually, these tend to be labeled fads , and disappear as quickly as they appear. The term vernacular culture differs from folklore in its overriding emphasis on a specific locality or region. For example, vernacular architecture denotes the standard building form of a region, using the materials available and designed to address functional needs of
2282-469: A major reason for the country's economic and political weakness, and he promised to restore a German realm based on a cleansed, and hence strong, German people. Racial or ethnic purity" was the goal of the Nazis, intent on forging a Greater Germanic Reich . In the postwar years, departments of folklore were established in multiple German universities. However an analysis of just how folklore studies supported
2445-443: A methodology that allows us to understand the complexity of the myth and its manifestations in contemporary times, is justified. Because "myth" is sometimes used in a pejorative sense, some scholars have opted for "mythos" instead. "Mythos" now more commonly refers to its Aristotelian sense as a "plot point" or to a body of interconnected myths or stories, especially those belonging to a particular religious or cultural tradition. It
2608-521: A modern academic discipline, folklore studies straddles the space between the social sciences and the humanities . The study of folklore originated in Europe in the first half of the 19th century with a focus on the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations. The " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " of the Brothers Grimm , first published 1812, is the best known collection of the verbal folklore of
2771-534: A myth can be highly controversial. Many religious adherents believe that the narratives told in their respective religious traditions are historical without question, and so object to their identification as myths while labelling traditional narratives from other religions as such. Hence, some scholars may label all religious narratives as "myths" for practical reasons, such as to avoid depreciating any one tradition because cultures interpret each other differently relative to one another. Other scholars may abstain from using
2934-503: A negative feedback loop at the next iteration. Both performer and audience are acting within the "Twin Laws" of folklore transmission , in which novelty and innovation is balanced by the conservative forces of the familiar. Even further, the presence of a folklore observer at a performance of any kind will influence the performance itself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Because folklore is firstly an act of communication between parties, it
3097-535: A new action. The field has expanded from a focus on mechanistic and biological systems to an expanded recognition that these theoretical constructs can also be applied to many cultural and societal systems, including folklore. Once divorced from a model of tradition that works solely on a linear time scale (i.e. moving from one folklore performance to the next), we begin to ask different questions about how these folklore artifacts maintain themselves over generations and centuries. The oral tradition of jokes as an example
3260-645: A number of subgenres, for example by setting or subject, or a distinctive national style, for example in the Indian Bollywood musical. A music genre is a conventional category that identifies pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. It is to be distinguished from musical form and musical style , although in practice these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. There are numerous genres in Western classical music and popular music , as well as musical theatre and
3423-411: A particular culture or community. The work of Georg Lukács also touches on the nature of literary genres , appearing separately but around the same time (1920s–1930s) as Bakhtin. Norman Fairclough has a similar concept of genre that emphasizes the social context of the text: Genres are "different ways of (inter)acting discoursally" (Fairclough, 2003: 26). A text's genre may be determined by its: In
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#17327724379473586-485: A pattern of behavior to be imitated, testifies to the efficacy of ritual with its practical ends and establishes the sanctity of cult . Another definition of myth comes from myth criticism theorist and professor José Manuel Losada . According to Cultural Myth Criticism, the studies of myth must explain and understand "myth from inside", that is, only "as a myth". Losada defines myth as "a functional, symbolic and thematic narrative of one or several extraordinary events with
3749-532: A poetic description of the sea as "raging" was eventually taken literally and the sea was then thought of as a raging god. Some thinkers claimed that myths result from the personification of objects and forces. According to these thinkers, the ancients worshiped natural phenomena, such as fire and air, gradually deifying them. For example, according to this theory, ancients tended to view things as gods, not as mere objects. Thus, they described natural events as acts of personal gods, giving rise to myths. According to
3912-596: A primordial age when the world had not achieved its later form. Origin myths explain how a society's customs , institutions , and taboos were established and sanctified. National myths are narratives about a nation's past that symbolize the nation's values. There is a complex relationship between recital of myths and the enactment of rituals . The word "myth" comes from Ancient Greek μῦθος ( mȳthos ), meaning 'speech, narrative, fiction, myth, plot'. In turn, Ancient Greek μυθολογία ( mythología , 'story', 'lore', 'legends', or 'the telling of stories') combines
4075-618: A scholarly term for "[a] traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events." The Greek term mythología was then borrowed into Late Latin , occurring in the title of Latin author Fulgentius ' 5th-century Mythologiæ to denote what is now referred to as classical mythology —i.e., Greco-Roman etiological stories involving their gods. Fulgentius' Mythologiæ explicitly treated its subject matter as allegories requiring interpretation and not as true events. The Latin term
4238-447: A social group and to collect their lore, preferably in situ. Once collected, these data need to be documented and preserved to enable further access and study. The documented lore is then available to be analyzed and interpreted by folklorists and other cultural historians, and can become the basis for studies of either individual customs or comparative studies. There are multiple venues, be they museums, journals or folk festivals to present
4401-565: A step further, incorporating the study of the transcendent dimension (its function, its disappearance) to evaluate the role of myth as a mirror of contemporary culture. Cultural myth criticism Cultural myth criticism, without abandoning the analysis of the symbolic , invades all cultural manifestations and delves into the difficulties in understanding myth today. This cultural myth criticism studies mythical manifestations in fields as wide as literature , film and television , theater , sculpture , painting , video games , music , dancing ,
4564-481: A story, or allegorical personifications. They usually deal with subjects drawn from "everyday life". These are distinguished from staffage : incidental figures in what is primarily a landscape or architectural painting. "Genre" is also be used to refer to specialized types of art such as still-life , landscapes, marine paintings and animal paintings, or groups of artworks with other particular features in terms of subject-matter, style or iconography . The concept of
4727-536: A structured classification system of genre, as opposed to a more contemporary rhetorical model of genre. The basic genres of film can be regarded as drama, in the feature film and most cartoons , and documentary . Most dramatic feature films, especially from Hollywood fall fairly comfortably into one of a long list of film genres such as the Western , war film , horror film , romantic comedy film , musical , crime film , and many others. Many of these genres have
4890-460: A study of homoerotic subtext in American football and anal-erotic elements in German folklore, were not always appreciated and involved Dundes in several major folklore studies controversies during his career. True to each of these approaches, and any others one might want to employ (political, women's issues, material culture, urban contexts, non-verbal text, ad infinitum), whichever perspective
5053-678: A systematic and pioneering way since the late 19th century. In the work of compiling the popular traditions of the Chilean people and of the original peoples, they stood out, not only in the study of national folklore, but also in Latin America. Ramón Laval, Julio Vicuña, Rodolfo Lenz, José Toribio Medina, Tomás Guevara, Félix de Augusta, and Aukanaw, among others, generated an important documentary and critical corpus around oral literature , autochthonous languages, regional dialects, and peasant and indigenous customs. They published, mainly during
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5216-434: A transcendent, sacred and supernatural referent; that lacks, in principle, historical testimony; and that refers to an individual or collective, but always absolute, cosmogony or eschatology". According to the hylistic myth research by assyriologist Annette Zgoll and classic philologist Christian Zgoll , "A myth can be defined as an Erzählstoff [narrative material] which is polymorphic through its variants and – depending on
5379-466: A trove of cultures rubbing elbows with each other, mixing and matching into exciting combinations as new generations come up. It is in the study of their folklife that we begin to understand the cultural patterns underlying the different ethnic groups. Language and customs provide a window into their view of reality. "The study of varying worldviews among ethnic and national groups in America remains one of
5542-510: A viable mode. He then uses two additional criteria to distinguish the system. The first of the criteria is the object to be imitated, whether superior or inferior. The second criterion is the medium of presentation: words, gestures, or verse. Essentially, the three categories of mode , object , and medium can be visualized along an XYZ axis. Excluding the criteria of medium, Aristotle's system distinguished four types of classical genres: tragedy , epic , comedy , and parody . Genette explained
5705-399: A wide-variety of sometimes synonymous terms. Folklore was the original term used in this discipline. Its synonym, folklife , came into circulation in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when some researchers felt that the term folklore was too closely tied exclusively to oral lore. The new term folklife , along with its synonym folk culture , is meant to include all aspects of
5868-574: A world of the remote past, very different from that of the present. Definitions of "myth" vary to some extent among scholars, though Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko offers a widely-cited definition: Myth, a story of the gods, a religious account of the beginning of the world , the creation , fundamental events, the exemplary deeds of the gods as a result of which the world, nature and culture were created together with all parts thereof and given their order, which still obtains. A myth expresses and confirms society's religious values and norms, it provides
6031-418: Is a condition of the human mind and not a stage in its historical development." Recent scholarship, noting the fundamental lack of evidence for "nature mythology" interpretations among people who actually circulated myths, has likewise abandoned the key ideas of "nature mythology". Frazer saw myths as a misinterpretation of magical rituals, which were themselves based on a mistaken idea of natural law. This idea
6194-464: Is a form of understanding and telling stories that are connected to power, political structures, and political and economic interests. These approaches contrast with approaches, such as those of Joseph Campbell and Eliade , which hold that myth has some type of essential connection to ultimate sacred meanings that transcend cultural specifics. In particular, myth was studied in relation to history from diverse social sciences. Most of these studies share
6357-548: Is a highly specialized, narrow classification of a cultural practice. The term has come into usage in the 21st century, and most commonly refers to music. It is also associated with the hyper-specific categories used in recommendations for television shows and movies on digital streaming platforms such as Netflix , and is sometimes used more broadly by scholars analyzing niche forms in other periods and other media. Folklore studies Folklore studies (also known as folkloristics, tradition studies or folk life studies in
6520-594: Is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. " This expanded social definition of folk expands the material considered to be folklore artifacts to include "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". The folklorist studies
6683-465: Is best known for his collection of epic Finnish poems published under the title Kalevala . John Fanning Watson in the United States published the "Annals of Philadelphia". With increasing industrialization, urbanization, and the rise in literacy throughout Europe in the 19th century, folklorists were concerned that the oral knowledge and beliefs, the lore of the rural folk would be lost. It
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6846-527: Is chosen will spotlight some features and leave other characteristics in the shadows. With the passage in 1976 of the American Folklife Preservation Act, folklore studies in the United States came of age. This legislation follows in the footsteps of other legislation designed to safeguard more tangible aspects of our national heritage worthy of protection. This law also marks a shift in our national awareness; it gives voice to
7009-420: Is found across all cultures, and is documented as early as 1600 B.C. Whereas the subject matter varies widely to reflect its cultural context, the form of the joke remains remarkably consistent. According to the theories of cybernetics and its secondary field of autopoiesis , this can be attributed to a closed loop auto-correction built into the system maintenance of oral folklore. Auto-correction in oral folklore
7172-446: Is further subdivided into epic , lyric , and drama . The divisions are recognized as being set by Aristotle and Plato ; however, they were not the only ones. Many genre theorists added to these accepted forms of poetry . The earliest recorded systems of genre in Western history can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle . Gérard Genette explains his interpretation of the history of genre in "The Architext". He described Plato as
7335-451: Is incomplete without inclusion of the reception in its analysis. The understanding of folklore performance as communication leads directly into modern linguistic theory and communication studies . Words both reflect and shape our worldview. Oral traditions, particularly in their stability over generations and even centuries, provide significant insight into the ways in which insiders of a culture see, understand, and express their responses to
7498-607: Is just a partial list of the fields of study related to folklore studies, all of which are united by a common interest in subject matter. It is well-documented that the term folklore was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms . He fabricated it for use in an article published in the August 22, 1846 issue of The Athenaeum . Thoms consciously replaced the contemporary terminology of popular antiquities or popular literature with this new word. Folklore
7661-521: Is met or not. Many genres have built-in audiences and corresponding publications that support them, such as magazines and websites. Inversely, audiences may call out for change in an antecedent genre and create an entirely new genre. The term may be used in categorizing web pages , like "news page" and "fan page", with both very different layout, audience, and intention (Rosso, 2008). Some search engines like Vivísimo try to group found web pages into automated categories in an attempt to show various genres
7824-418: Is nobody's truth. Myths are somebody's truth." One theory claims that myths are distorted accounts of historical events. According to this theory, storytellers repeatedly elaborate upon historical accounts until the figures in those accounts gain the status of gods. For example, the myth of the wind-god Aeolus may have evolved from a historical account of a king who taught his people to use sails and interpret
7987-407: Is often applied, sometimes rather loosely, to other media with an artistic element, such as video game genres . Genre, and numerous minutely divided subgenres, affect popular culture very significantly, not least as they are used to classify it for publicity purposes. The vastly increased output of popular culture in the age of electronic media encourages dividing cultural products by genre to simplify
8150-462: Is often thought to differ from genres such as legend and folktale in that neither are considered to be sacred narratives. Some kinds of folktales, such as fairy stories , are not considered true by anyone, and may be seen as distinct from myths for this reason. Main characters in myths are usually gods , demigods or supernatural humans, while legends generally feature humans as their main characters. Many exceptions and combinations exist, as in
8313-634: Is sometimes known as "mythography", a term also used for a scholarly anthology of myths or of the study of myths generally. Key mythographers in the Classical tradition include: Other prominent mythographies include the thirteenth-century Prose Edda attributed to the Icelander Snorri Sturluson , which is the main surviving survey of Norse Mythology from the Middle Ages. Jeffrey G. Snodgrass (professor of anthropology at
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#17327724379478476-508: Is sometimes used specifically for modern, fictional mythologies, such as the world building of H. P. Lovecraft . Mythopoeia ( mytho- + -poeia , 'I make myth') was termed by J. R. R. Tolkien , amongst others, to refer to the "conscious generation" of mythology. It was notoriously also suggested, separately, by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg . Comparative mythology is a systematic comparison of myths from different cultures. It seeks to discover underlying themes that are common to
8639-631: Is the Jewish Christmas Tree , a point of some contention among American Jews. Public sector folklore was introduced into the American Folklore Society in the early 1970s. These public folklorists work in museums and cultural agencies to identify and document the diverse folk cultures and folk artists in their region. Beyond this, they provide performance venues for the artists, with the twin objectives of entertainment and education about different ethnic groups. Given
8802-574: The Iliad , Odyssey and Aeneid . Moreover, as stories spread between cultures or as faiths change, myths can come to be considered folktales, their divine characters recast as either as humans or demihumans such as giants , elves and faeries . Conversely, historical and literary material may acquire mythological qualities over time. For example, the Matter of Britain (the legendary history of Great Britain, especially those focused on King Arthur and
8965-457: The Republic . His critique was primarily on the grounds that the uneducated might take the stories of gods and heroes literally. Nevertheless, he constantly referred to myths throughout his writings. As Platonism developed in the phases commonly called Middle Platonism and neoplatonism , writers such as Plutarch , Porphyry , Proclus , Olympiodorus , and Damascius wrote explicitly about
9128-804: The Theologia Mythologica (1532). The first modern, Western scholarly theories of myth appeared during the second half of the 19th century—at the same time as "myth" was adopted as a scholarly term in European languages. They were driven partly by a new interest in Europe's ancient past and vernacular culture, associated with Romantic Nationalism and epitomised by the research of Jacob Grimm (1785–1863). This movement drew European scholars' attention not only to Classical myths, but also material now associated with Norse mythology , Finnish mythology , and so forth. Western theories were also partly driven by Europeans' efforts to comprehend and control
9291-620: The Colorado State University ) has termed India's Bhats as mythographers. Myth criticism is a system of anthropological interpretation of culture created by French philosopher Gilbert Durand . Scholars have used myth criticism to explain the mythical roots of contemporary fiction, which means that modern myth criticism needs to be interdisciplinary . Professor Losada offers his own methodologic, hermeneutic and epistemological approach to myth. While assuming mythopoetical perspectives, Losada's Cultural Myth Criticism takes
9454-616: The Historical-Geographical method , also called the Finnish method. Using multiple variants of a tale, this investigative method attempted to work backwards in time and location to compile the original version from what they considered the incomplete fragments still in existence. This was the search for the "Urform", which by definition was more complete and more "authentic" than the newer, more scattered versions. The historic-geographic method has been succinctly described as
9617-522: The Renaissance period. According to Green, "Beethoven's Op. 61 and Mendelssohn's Op. 64 are identical in genre – both are violin concertos – but different in form. However, Mozart's Rondo for Piano, K. 511 , and the Agnus Dei from his Mass, K. 317 are quite different in genre but happen to be similar in form." Some, like Peter van der Merwe , treat the terms genre and style as
9780-667: The Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife festivals around the country. Folklore interest sparked in Turkey around the second half of the nineteenth century when the need to determine a national language came about. Their writings consisted of vocabulary and grammatical rule from the Arabic and Persian language. Although the Ottoman intellectuals were not affected by the communication gap, in 1839,
9943-554: The Tanzimat reform introduced a change to Ottoman literature. A new generation of writers with contact to the West, especially France, noticed the importance of literature and its role in the development of institutions. Following the models set by Westerners, the new generation of writers returned to Turkey bringing the ideologies of novels, short stories, plays and journalism with them. These new forms of literature were set to enlighten
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#173277243794710106-725: The number of folk festivals held around the world, it becomes clear that the cultural multiplicity of a region is presented with pride and excitement. Public folklorists are increasingly being involved in economic and community development projects to elucidate and clarify differing world views of the social groups impacted by the projects. Once folklore artifacts have been recorded on the World Wide Web, they can be collected in large electronic databases and even moved into collections of big data . This compels folklorists to find new ways to collect and curate these data. Along with these new challenges, electronic data collections provide
10269-423: The traditional artifacts of a group and the groups within which these customs, traditions and beliefs are transmitted. Transmission of folk artifacts is necessary to their preservation over time outside of study by cultural archaeologist. Beliefs and customs are passed informally within a folk group mainly anonymously and in multiple variants. This is in contrast to high culture , characterized by recognition by
10432-536: The " hierarchy of genres " was a powerful one in artistic theory, especially between the 17th and 19th centuries. It was strongest in France, where it was associated with the Académie française which held a central role in academic art . The genres, which were mainly applied to painting, in hierarchical order are: The hierarchy was based on a distinction between art that made an intellectual effort to "render visible
10595-594: The 20th century that Folklore Studies in Europe and America began to diverge. The Europeans continued with their emphasis on oral traditions of the pre-literate peasant, and remained connected to literary scholarship within the universities. By this definition, folklore was completely based in the European cultural sphere; any social group that did not originate in Europe was to be studied by ethnologists and cultural anthropologists . In this light, some twenty-first century scholars have interpreted European folkloristics as an instrument of internal colonialism , in parallel with
10758-828: The Bicentennial Celebration included a definition of folklore, also called folklife : "...[Folklife] means the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction." This law in conjunction with other legislation
10921-499: The European peasantry. This interest in stories, sayings and songs, i.e. verbal lore , continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folklore studies with literature and mythology . By the turn into the 20th century, European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogeneous peasant populations in their regions, while the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas , chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included
11084-584: The Internet and other artistic fields . Myth criticism, a discipline that studies myths (mythology contains them, like a pantheon its statues), is by nature interdisciplinary: it combines the contributions of literary theory, the history of literature, the fine arts and the new ways of dissemination in the age of communication. Likewise, it undertakes its object of study from its interrelation with other human and social sciences, in particular sociology , anthropology and economics . The need for an approach, for
11247-532: The Nazi Party. Their expressed goal was to re-establish what they perceived as the former purity of the Germanic peoples of Europe. The German anti-Nazi philosopher Ernst Bloch was one of the main analysts and critics of this ideology. "Nazi ideology presented racial purity as the means to heal the wounds of the suffering German state following World War I. Hitler painted the ethnic heterogeneity of Germany as
11410-676: The Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore" declared a global need to establish provisions protecting folklore from varying dangers identified in the document. UNESCO further published the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003. The American Folklife Preservation Act (P.L. 94-201) passed in 1976 by the United States Congress in conjunction with
11573-564: The Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School . The critical interpretation of myth began with the Presocratics . Euhemerus was one of the most important pre-modern mythologists. He interpreted myths as accounts of actual historical events, though distorted over many retellings. Sallustius divided myths into five categories: Plato condemned poetic myth when discussing education in
11736-539: The UK) is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore . This term, along with its synonyms, gained currency in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. It became established as a field across both Europe and North America, coordinating with Volkskunde ( German ), folkeminner ( Norwegian ), and folkminnen ( Swedish ), among others. A 1982 UNESCO document titled "Recommendation on
11899-538: The advent of the digital age , the question once again foregrounds itself concerning the relevance of folklore in this new century. Although the profession in folklore grows and the articles and books on folklore topics proliferate, the traditional role of the folklorist is indeed changing. The United States is known as a land of immigrants; with the exception of the first Indian nations , everyone originally came from somewhere else. Americans are proud of their cultural diversity . For folklorists, this country represents
12062-455: The amateur at the turn of the 20th century was to collect and classify cultural artifacts from the pre-industrial rural areas, parallel to the drive in the life sciences to do the same for the natural world. "Folk was a clear label to set materials apart from modern life…material specimens, which were meant to be classified in the natural history of civilization. Tales, originally dynamic and fluid, were given stability and concreteness by means of
12225-456: The assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best. Genres proliferate and develop beyond Aristotle's classifications— in response to changes in audiences and creators. Genre has become a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictability through artistic expression. Given that art is often a response to a social state, in that people write, paint, sing, dance, and otherwise produce art about what they know about,
12388-648: The assumption that history and myth are not distinct in the sense that history is factual, real, accurate, and truth, while myth is the opposite. Genre Critical discussion of genre perhaps began with a classification system for ancient Greek literature , as set out in Aristotle's Poetics . For Aristotle, poetry ( odes , epics , etc.), prose , and performance each had specific features that supported appropriate content of each genre. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, for example, and even actors were restricted to their genre under
12551-601: The auspices of the Federal Writers Project during these years continues to offer a goldmine of primary source materials for folklorists and other cultural historians. As chairman of the Federal Writers' Project between 1938 and 1942, Benjamin A. Botkin supervised the work of these folklore field workers. Both Botkin and John Lomax were particularly influential during this time in expanding folklore collection techniques to include more detailing of
12714-740: The beliefs and customs of diverse cultural groups in their region. These positions are often affiliated with museums, libraries, arts organizations, public schools, historical societies, etc. The most renowned of these is the American Folklife Center at the Smithsonian, which hosts the Smithsonian Folklife Festival every summer in Washington, DC. Public folklore differentiates itself from the academic folklore supported by universities, in which collection, research and analysis are primary goals. The field of folklore studies uses
12877-433: The closely related concept of "genre ecologies". Reiff and Bawarshi define genre analysis as a critical reading of people's patterns of communication in different situations. This tradition has had implications for the teaching of writing in American colleges and universities. Combining rhetorical genre theory with activity theory , David Russell has proposed that standard English composition courses are ill-suited to teach
13040-469: The concept of the Oedipus complex in his 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams . Jung likewise tried to understand the psychology behind world myths. Jung asserted that all humans share certain innate unconscious psychological forces, which he called archetypes . He believed similarities between the myths of different cultures reveals the existence of these universal archetypes. The mid-20th century saw
13203-505: The constant rhythms of the natural world. Within the last decades our time scale has expanded from unimaginably small ( nanoseconds ) to unimaginably large ( deep time ). In comparison, our working concept of time as {past : present : future} looks almost quaint. How do we map "tradition" into this multiplicity of time scales? Folklore studies has already acknowledged this in the study of traditions which are either done in an annual cycle of circular time (ex. Christmas, May Day), or in
13366-418: The creator of three imitational, mimetic genres distinguished by mode of imitation rather than content. These three imitational genres include dramatic dialogue, the drama ; pure narrative, the dithyramb ; and a mixture of the two, the epic . Plato excluded lyric poetry as a non-mimetic, imitational mode. Genette further discussed how Aristotle revised Plato's system by first eliminating the pure narrative as
13529-596: The cultures, stories and religions they were encountering through colonialism . These encounters included both extremely old texts such as the Sanskrit Rigveda and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh , and current oral narratives such as mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas or stories told in traditional African religions . The intellectual context for nineteenth-century scholars
13692-491: The customs and beliefs of the group. Or it can be performance for an outside group, in which the first goal is to set the performers apart from the audience. This analysis then goes beyond the artifact itself, be it dance, music or story-telling. It goes beyond the performers and their message. As part of performance studies, the audience becomes part of the performance. If any folklore performance strays too far from audience expectations, it will likely be brought back by means of
13855-667: The digital age, the binary thinking of the 20th century structuralists remains an important tool in the folklorist's toolbox. This does not mean that binary thinking was invented in recent times along with computers; only that we became aware of both the power and the limitations of the "either/or" construction. In folklore studies, the multiple binaries underlying much of the theoretical thinking have been identified – {dynamicism : conservatism}, {anecdote : myth}, {process : structure}, {performance : tradition}, {improvisation : repetition}, {variation : traditionalism}, {repetition : innovation}; not to overlook
14018-414: The discipline is that this term places undue emphasis on the origination of the artifact as a sign of authenticity of the tradition. Adjacently, the adjective folkloric is used to designate materials having the character of folklore or tradition, at the same time making no claim to authenticity. There are several goals of active folklore research. The first objective is to identify tradition bearers within
14181-431: The elites of a given society and identified as specific works created by individuals. The folklorist study the significance of these beliefs, customs and objects for the group. In folklore studies "folklore means something – to the tale teller, to the song singer, to the fiddler, and to the audience or addressees". The field assumes cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within
14344-428: The emerging middle class. For literate, urban intellectuals and students of folklore the folk was someone else and the past was recognized as being something truly different. Folklore became a measure of the progress of society , how far we had moved forward into the industrial present and indeed removed ourselves from a past marked by poverty, illiteracy and superstition. The task of both the professional folklorist and
14507-415: The event of doing something within a given context, for a specific audience, using artifacts as necessary props in the communication of traditions between individuals and within groups. Beginning in the 1970s, these new areas of folklore studies became articulated in performance studies , where traditional behaviors are evaluated and understood within the context of their performance. It is the meaning within
14670-948: The field of rhetoric , genre theorists usually understand genres as types of actions rather than types or forms of texts. On this perspective, texts are channels through which genres are enacted. Carolyn Miller's work has been especially important for this perspective. Drawing on Lloyd Bitzer 's concept of rhetorical situation, Miller reasons that recurring rhetorical problems tend to elicit recurring responses; drawing on Alfred Schütz , she reasons that these recurring responses become "typified" – that is, socially constructed as recognizable types. Miller argues that these "typified rhetorical actions" (p. 151) are properly understood as genres. Building off of Miller, Charles Bazerman and Clay Spinuzzi have argued that genres understood as actions derive their meaning from other genres – that is, other actions. Bazerman therefore proposes that we analyze genres in terms of "genre systems", while Spinuzzi prefers
14833-469: The field of folklore studies even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field. Public folklore is a relatively new offshoot of folklore studies, starting after the Second World War and modeled on the work of Alan Lomax and Ben Botkin in the 1930s. Lomax and Botkin emphasized applied folklore , with modern public sector folklorists working to document, preserve and present
14996-532: The first decades of the 20th century, linguistic and philological studies, dictionaries, comparative studies between the national folklores of Ibero-America, compilations of stories, poetry, and religious traditions. In 1909, at the initiative of Laval, Vicuña and Lenz, the Chilean Folklore Society was founded, the first of its kind in America. Two years later, it would merge with the recently created Chilean Society of History and Geography. With
15159-485: The first example of "myth" in 1830. The main characters in myths are usually non-humans, such as gods , demigods , and other supernatural figures. Others include humans, animals, or combinations in their classification of myth. Stories of everyday humans, although often of leaders of some type, are usually contained in legends , as opposed to myths. Myths are sometimes distinguished from legends in that myths deal with gods, usually have no historical basis, and are set in
15322-498: The fore following World War II; as spokesman, William Bascom formulated the 4 functions of folklore . This approach takes a more top-down approach to understand how a specific form fits into and expresses meaning within the culture as a whole. A third method of folklore analysis, popular in the late 20th century, is the Psychoanalytic Interpretation, championed by Alan Dundes . His monographs, including
15485-445: The foremost functions of myth is to establish models for behavior and that myths may provide a religious experience. By telling or reenacting myths, members of traditional societies detach themselves from the present, returning to the mythical age, thereby coming closer to the divine. Honko asserted that, in some cases, a society reenacts a myth in an attempt to reproduce the conditions of the mythical age. For example, it might reenact
15648-593: The fourth and final type of Greek literature , was excluded by Plato as a non-mimetic mode. Aristotle later revised Plato's system by eliminating the pure narrative as a viable mode and distinguishing by two additional criteria: the object to be imitated, as objects could be either superior or inferior, and the medium of presentation such as words, gestures or verse. Essentially, the three categories of mode, object, and medium dialogue, epic (superior-mixed narrative), comedy (inferior-dramatic dialogue), and parody (inferior-mixed narrative). Genette continues by explaining
15811-401: The genres prose or poetry , which shows best how loosely genres are defined. Additionally, a genre such as satire might appear in any of the above, not only as a subgenre but as a mixture of genres. Finally, they are defined by the general cultural movement of the historical period in which they were composed. In popular fiction , which is especially divided by genres, genre fiction is
15974-492: The genres that students will write in other contexts across the university and beyond. Elizabeth Wardle contends that standard composition courses do teach genres, but that these are inauthentic "mutt genres" that are often of little use outside composition courses. Genre is effective as a tool in rhetoric because it allows a speaker to set the context for a rhetorical discussion. Devitt, Reiff, and Bawarshi suggest that rhetorical genres may be assigned based on careful analysis of
16137-461: The group, though their meaning can shift and morph with time. Folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group. Folklore does not need to be old; it continues through the modern day. It is created, transmitted, and used to establish "us" and "them" within a given group. The unique nature of a culture's folklore requires the development of methods of study by the culture at hand for effective identification and research. As
16300-532: The healing performed by a god at the beginning of time in order to heal someone in the present. Similarly, Barthes argued that modern culture explores religious experience. Since it is not the job of science to define human morality, a religious experience is an attempt to connect with a perceived moral past, which is in contrast with the technological present. Pattanaik defines mythology as "the subjective truth of people communicated through stories, symbols and rituals." He says, "Facts are everybody's truth. Fiction
16463-457: The imperialistic dimensions of early 20th century cultural anthropology and Orientalism . Unlike contemporary anthropology, however, many early European folklorists were themselves members of the prioritized groups that folkloristics was intended to study; for instance, Andrew Lang and James George Frazer were both themselves Scotsmen and studied rural folktales from towns near where they grew up. In contrast to this, American folklorists, under
16626-525: The influence of the German-American Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict , sought to incorporate other cultural groups living in their region into the study of folklore. This included not only customs brought over by northern European immigrants, but also African Americans, Acadians of eastern Canada, Cajuns of Louisiana, Hispanics of the American southwest, and Native Americans . Not only were these distinct cultural groups all living in
16789-422: The influential development of a structuralist theory of mythology , led by Lévi-Strauss . Strauss argued that myths reflect patterns in the mind and interpreted those patterns more as fixed mental structures, specifically pairs of opposites (good/evil, compassionate/callous), rather than unconscious feelings or urges. Meanwhile, Bronislaw Malinowski developed analyses of myths focusing on their social functions in
16952-573: The integration of lyric poetry into the classical system by replacing the removed pure narrative mode. Lyric poetry , once considered non-mimetic, was deemed to imitate feelings, becoming the third "Architext", a term coined by Gennette, of a new long-enduring tripartite system: lyrical; epical, the mixed narrative; and dramatic, the dialogue. This new system that came to "dominate all the literary theory of German romanticism " (Genette 38) has seen numerous attempts at expansion and revision. Such attempts include Friedrich Schlegel 's triad of subjective form,
17115-534: The interview context. This was a significant move away from viewing the collected artifacts as isolated fragments, broken remnants of an incomplete pre-historic whole. Using these new interviewing techniques, the collected lore became embedded in and imbued with meaning within the framework of its contemporary practice. The emphasis moved from the lore to the folk, i.e. the groups and the people who gave this lore meaning within contemporary daily living. In Europe during these same decades, folklore studies were drifting in
17278-707: The knights of the Round Table ) and the Matter of France , seem distantly to originate in historical events of the 5th and 8th centuries, respectively, and became mythologised over the following centuries. In colloquial use, "myth" can also be used of a collectively held belief that has no basis in fact, or any false story. This usage, which is often pejorative , arose from labelling the religious myths and beliefs of other cultures as incorrect, but it has spread to cover non-religious beliefs as well. As commonly used by folklorists and academics in other relevant fields, such as anthropology , "myth" has no implication whether
17441-520: The later integration of lyric poetry into the classical system during the romantic period , replacing the now removed pure narrative mode. Lyric poetry, once considered non-mimetic, was deemed to imitate feelings, becoming the third leg of a new tripartite system: lyrical, epical, and dramatic dialogue. This system, which came to "dominate all the literary theory of German romanticism (and therefore well beyond)…" (38), has seen numerous attempts at expansion or revision. However, more ambitious efforts to expand
17604-417: The local economy. Folk architecture is a subset of this, in which the construction is not done by a professional architect or builder, but by an individual putting up a needed structure in the local style. Therefore, all folklore is vernacular culture, but not all vernacular culture necessarily folklore. In addition to these terms, folklorism refers to "material or stylistic elements of folklore [presented] in
17767-496: The lyric; objective form, the dramatic; and subjective-objective form, the epic. However, more ambitious efforts to expand the tripartite system resulted in new taxonomic systems of increasing complexity. Gennette reflected upon these various systems, comparing them to the original tripartite arrangement: "its structure is somewhat superior to most of those that have come after, fundamentally flawed as they are by their inclusive and hierarchical taxonomy, which each time immediately brings
17930-522: The masses. He later produced a collection of four thousand proverbs. Many other poets and writers throughout the Turkish nation began to join in on the movement including Ahmet Midhat Efendi who composed short stories based on the proverbs written by Sinasi. These short stories, like many folk stories today, were intended to teach moral lessons to its readers. The study of folklore in Chile was developed in
18093-510: The more usual term. In literature , genre has been known as an intangible taxonomy . This taxonomy implies a concept of containment or that an idea will be stable forever. The earliest recorded systems of genre in Western history can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Gérard Genette , a French literary theorist and author of The Architext , describes Plato as creating three Imitational genres: dramatic dialogue, pure narrative, and epic (a mixture of dialogue and narrative). Lyric poetry ,
18256-499: The most extensive literary use of American folklore of its time. By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published a first classification system for folktales in 1910. It was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains
18419-492: The most important unfinished tasks for folklorists and anthropologists." Contrary to a widespread concern, we are not seeing a loss of diversity and increasing cultural homogenization across the land. In fact, critics of this theory point out that as different cultures mix, the cultural landscape becomes multifaceted with the intermingling of customs. People become aware of other cultures and pick and choose different items to adopt from each other. One noteworthy example of this
18582-847: The music of non-Western cultures. The term is now perhaps over-used to describe relatively small differences in musical style in modern rock music , that also may reflect sociological differences in their audiences. Timothy Laurie suggests that in the context of rock and pop music studies, the "appeal of genre criticism is that it makes narratives out of musical worlds that often seem to lack them". Music can be divided into different genres in several ways. The artistic nature of music means that these classifications are often arbitrary and controversial, and some genres may overlap. There are several academic approaches to genres. In his book Form in Tonal Music , Douglass M. Green lists madrigal , motet , canzona , ricercar , and dance as examples of genres from
18745-461: The myth-ritual theory, myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims myths arose to explain rituals. This claim was first put forward by Smith , who argued that people begin performing rituals for reasons not related to myth. Forgetting the original reason for a ritual, they account for it by inventing a myth and claiming the ritual commemorates the events described in that myth. James George Frazer —author of The Golden Bough ,
18908-429: The myths of multiple cultures. In some cases, comparative mythologists use the similarities between separate mythologies to argue that those mythologies have a common source. This source may inspire myths or provide a common "protomythology" that diverged into the mythologies of each culture. A number of commentators have argued that myths function to form and shape society and social behaviour. Eliade argued that one of
19071-563: The narrative may be understood as true or otherwise. Among biblical scholars of both the Old and New Testament, the word "myth" has a technical meaning, in that it usually refers to "describe the actions of the other‐worldly in terms of this world" such as the Creation and the Fall. Since "myth" is popularly used to describe stories that are not objectively true , the identification of a narrative as
19234-417: The national understanding that diversity within the country is a unifying feature, not something that separates us. "We no longer view cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This diversity is celebrated annually at
19397-482: The need to collect these vestiges of rural traditions became more compelling, the need to formalize this new field of cultural studies became apparent. The British Folklore Society was established in 1878 and the American Folklore Society was established a decade later. These were just two of a plethora of academic societies founded in the latter half of the 19th century by educated members of
19560-538: The opportunity to ask different questions, and combine with other academic fields to explore new aspects of traditional culture. Computational humor is just one new field that has taken up the traditional oral forms of jokes and anecdotes for study, holding its first dedicated conference in 1996. This takes us beyond gathering and categorizing large joke collections. Scholars are using computers firstly to recognize jokes in context, and further to attempt to create jokes using artificial intelligence . As we move forward in
19723-466: The original binary of the first folklorists: {traditional : modern} or {old : new}. Bauman re-iterates this thought pattern in claiming that at the core of all folklore is the dynamic tension between tradition and variation (or creativity). Noyes uses similar vocabulary to define [folk] group as "the ongoing play and tension between, on the one hand, the fluid networks of relationship we constantly both produce and negotiate in everyday life and, on
19886-569: The other, the imagined communities we also create and enact but that serve as forces of stabilizing allegiance." This thinking only becomes problematic in light of the theoretical work done on binary opposition , which exposes the values intrinsic to any binary pair. Typically, one of the two opposites assumes a role of dominance over the other. The categorization of binary oppositions is "often value-laden and ethnocentric", imbuing them with illusory order and superficial meaning. Another baseline of western thought has also been thrown into disarray in
20049-493: The people of Turkey, influencing political and social change within the country. However, the lack of understanding for the language of their writings limited their success in enacting change. Using the language of the "common people" to create literature, influenced the Tanzimat writers to gain interest in folklore and folk literature. In 1859, writer Sinasi , wrote a play in simple enough language that it could be understood by
20212-712: The policies of the Third Reich did not begin until 20 years after World War II in West Germany. Particularly in the works of Hermann Bausinger and Wolfgang Emmerich in the 1960s, it was pointed out that the vocabulary current in Volkskunde was ideally suited for the kind of ideology that the National Socialists had built up. It was then another 20 years before convening the 1986 Munich conference on folklore and National Socialism. This continues to be
20375-484: The printed page." Viewed as fragments from a pre-literate culture, these stories and objects were collected without context to be displayed and studied in museums and anthologies, just as bones and potsherds were gathered for the life sciences. Kaarle Krohn and Antti Aarne were active collectors of folk poetry in Finland. The Scotsman Andrew Lang is known for his 25 volumes of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books from around
20538-425: The rationalization of myths, putting themes formerly imbued with mythological qualities into pragmatic contexts. An example of this would be following a cultural or religious paradigm shift (notably the re-interpretation of pagan mythology following Christianization ). Interest in polytheistic mythology revived during the Renaissance , with early works of mythography appearing in the sixteenth century, among them
20701-542: The real world. He is associated with the idea that myths such as origin stories might provide a "mythic charter"—a legitimisation—for cultural norms and social institutions . Thus, following the Structuralist Era ( c. 1960s –1980s), the predominant anthropological and sociological approaches to myth increasingly treated myth as a form of narrative that can be studied, interpreted, and analyzed like ideology, history, and culture. In other words, myth
20864-544: The recent past. In western culture, we live in a time of progress , moving forward from one moment to the next. The goal is to become better and better, culminating in perfection. In this model time is linear, with direct causality in the progression. "You reap what you sow", "A stitch in time saves nine", "Alpha and omega", the Christian concept of an afterlife all exemplify a cultural understanding of time as linear and progressive. In folklore studies, going backwards in time
21027-406: The research results. The final step in this methodology involves advocating for these groups in their distinctiveness. The specific tools needed by folklorists to do their research are manifold. The folklorist also rubs shoulders with researchers, tools and inquiries of neighboring fields: literature, anthropology, cultural history, linguistics, geography, musicology, sociology, psychology. This
21190-484: The same regions, but their proximity to each other caused their traditions and customs to intermingle. The lore of these distinct social groups, all of them Americans, was considered the bailiwick of American folklorists, and aligned American folklore studies more with ethnology than with literary studies. Then came the 1930s and the worldwide Great Depression . In the United States the Federal Writers' Project
21353-431: The same, saying that genre should be defined as pieces of music that share a certain style or "basic musical language". Others, such as Allan F. Moore, state that genre and style are two separate terms, and that secondary characteristics such as subject matter can also differentiate between genres. A music genre or subgenre may be defined by the musical techniques , the styles, the context, and content and spirit of
21516-563: The search for products by consumers, a trend the Internet has only intensified. In philosophy of language , genre figures prominently in the works of philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin . Bakhtin's basic observations were of "speech genres" (the idea of heteroglossia ), modes of speaking or writing that people learn to mimic, weave together, and manipulate (such as "formal letter" and "grocery list", or "university lecture" and "personal anecdote"). In this sense, genres are socially specified: recognized and defined (often informally) by
21679-429: The search hits might fit. A subgenre is a subordinate within a genre, Two stories being the same genre can still sometimes differ in subgenre. For example, if a fantasy story has darker and more frightening elements of fantasy, it would belong in the subgenre of dark fantasy ; whereas another fantasy story that features magic swords and wizards would belong to the subgenre of sword and sorcery . A microgenre
21842-442: The social group that becomes the focus for these folklorists, foremost among them Richard Baumann and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett . Enclosing any performance is a framework which signals that the following is something outside of ordinary communication. For example, "So, have you heard the one…" automatically flags the following as a joke. A performance can take place either within a cultural group, re-iterating and re-enforcing
22005-419: The standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items which had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs. In an effort to understand and explain the similarities found in tales from different locations, the Finnish folklorists Julius and Kaarle Krohne developed
22168-407: The story, also varying each performance in response to multiple factors. Cybernetics was first developed in the 20th century; it investigates the functions and processes of systems. The goal in cybernetics is to identify and understand a system's closed signaling loop, in which an action by the system generates a change in the environment, which in turn triggers feedback to the system and initiates
22331-431: The study of German Volkskunde had yet to be defined as an academic discipline. In the 1920s this originally apolitical movement was coopted by nationalism in several European countries, including Germany, where it was absorbed into emerging Nazi ideology. The vocabulary of German Volkskunde such as Volk (folk), Rasse (race), Stamm (tribe), and Erbe (heritage) were frequently referenced by
22494-541: The subject matter and consideration of the audience. Genre is related to Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of Family resemblance in which he describes how genres act like a family tree, where members of a family are related, but not exact copies of one another. This concept of genre originated from the classification systems created by Plato . Plato divided literature into the three classic genres accepted in Ancient Greece : poetry , drama , and prose . Poetry
22657-420: The symbolic interpretation of traditional and Orphic myths. Mythological themes were consciously employed in literature, beginning with Homer . The resulting work may expressly refer to a mythological background without itself becoming part of a body of myths ( Cupid and Psyche ). Medieval romance in particular plays with this process of turning myth into literature. Euhemerism , as stated earlier, refers to
22820-460: The term "myth" altogether for purposes of avoiding placing pejorative overtones on sacred narratives. In present use, "mythology" usually refers to the collection of myths of a group of people. For example, Greek mythology , Roman mythology , Celtic mythology and Hittite mythology all describe the body of myths retold among those cultures. "Mythology" can also refer to the study of myths and mythologies. The compilation or description of myths
22983-623: The themes. Geographical origin is sometimes used to identify a music genre, though a single geographical category will often include a wide variety of subgenres. Several music scholars have criticized the priority accorded to genre-based communities and listening practices. For example, Laurie argues that "music genres do not belong to isolated, self-sufficient communities. People constantly move between environments where diverse forms of music are heard, advertised and accessorised with distinctive iconographies, narratives and celebrity identities that also touch on non-musical worlds." The concept of genre
23146-408: The totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folklore studies with cultural anthropology and ethnology . American folklorists thus used the same data collection techniques as these fields in their own field research . This the diverse alliance of folklore studies with other academic fields offers a variety of theoretical vantage points and research tools to
23309-456: The tripartite system resulted in new taxonomic systems of increasing scope and complexity. Genette reflects upon these various systems, comparing them to the original tripartite arrangement: "its structure is somewhat superior to…those that have come after, fundamentally flawed as they are by their inclusive and hierarchical taxonomy, which each time immediately brings the whole game to a standstill and produces an impasse" (74). Taxonomy allows for
23472-952: The universal essence of things" ( imitare in Italian) and that which merely consisted of "mechanical copying of particular appearances" ( ritrarre ). Idealism was privileged over realism in line with Renaissance Neo-Platonist philosophy. A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique , tone , content , or even (as in the case of fiction) length. Genre should not be confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as either adult, young adult , or children's . They also must not be confused with format, such as graphic novel or picture book. The distinctions between genres and categories are flexible and loosely defined, often with subgroups. The most general genres in literature are (in loose chronological order) epic , tragedy , comedy , novel , and short story . They can all be in
23635-414: The use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings. The term genre is much used in the history and criticism of visual art, but in art history has meanings that overlap rather confusingly. Genre painting is a term for paintings where the main subject features human figures to whom no specific identity attaches – in other words, figures are not portraits, characters from
23798-475: The variant – polystratic; an Erzählstoff in which transcending interpretations of what can be experienced are combined into a hyleme sequence with an implicit claim to relevance for the interpretation and mastering of the human condition." Scholars in other fields use the term "myth" in varied ways. In a broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story , popular misconception or imaginary entity. Though myth and other folklore genres may overlap, myth
23961-399: The whole game to a standstill and produces an impasse". Although genres are not always precisely definable, genre considerations are one of the most important factors in determining what a person will see or read. The classification properties of genre can attract or repel potential users depending on the individual's understanding of a genre. Genre creates an expectation in that expectation
24124-733: The winds. Herodotus (fifth-century BCE) and Prodicus made claims of this kind. This theory is named euhemerism after mythologist Euhemerus ( c. 320 BCE ), who suggested that Greek gods developed from legends about humans. Some theories propose that myths began as allegories for natural phenomena: Apollo represents the sun, Poseidon represents water, and so on. According to another theory, myths began as allegories for philosophical or spiritual concepts: Athena represents wise judgment, Aphrodite romantic desire, and so on. Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. He believed myths began as allegorical descriptions of nature and gradually came to be interpreted literally. For example,
24287-404: The word mȳthos with the suffix - λογία ( -logia , 'study') in order to mean 'romance, fiction, story-telling.' Accordingly, Plato used mythología as a general term for 'fiction' or 'story-telling' of any kind. In Anglicised form, this Greek word began to be used in English (and was likewise adapted into other European languages) in the early 19th century, in a much narrower sense, as
24450-487: The world around them. Three major approaches to folklore interpretation were developed during the second half of the 20th century. Structuralism in folklore studies attempts to define the structures underlying oral and customary folklore. Once classified, it was easy for structural folklorists to lose sight of the overarching issue: what are the characteristics which keep a form constant and relevant over multiple generations? Functionalism in folklore studies also came to
24613-546: The world. Francis James Child was an American academic who collected English and Scottish popular ballads and their American variants, published as the Child Ballads . In the United States, Mark Twain was a charter member of the American Folklore Society. Both he and Washington Irving drew on folklore to write their stories. The 1825 novel Brother Jonathan by John Neal is recognized as
24776-582: The year are stressed as important." In a more specific example, the folklorist Barre Toelken describes the Navajo as living in circular times, which is echoed and re-enforced in their sense of space, the traditional circular or multi-sided hogan . Lacking the European mechanistic devices of marking time (clocks, watches, calendars), they depended on the cycles of nature: sunrise to sunset, winter to summer. Their stories and histories are not marked by decades and centuries, but remain close in, as they circle around
24939-639: Was also a valid avenue of exploration. The goal of the early folklorists of the historic-geographic school was to reconstruct from fragments of folk tales the Urtext of the original mythic (pre-Christian) world view. When and where was an artifact documented? Those were the important questions posed by early folklorists in their collections. Armed with these data points, a grid pattern of time-space coordinates for artifacts could be plotted. Awareness has grown that different cultures have different concepts of time (and space). In his study "The American Indian Mind in
25102-1026: Was central to the " myth and ritual " school of thought. According to Frazer, humans begin with an unfounded belief in impersonal magical laws. When they realize applications of these laws do not work, they give up their belief in natural law in favor of a belief in personal gods controlling nature, thus giving rise to religious myths. Meanwhile, humans continue practicing formerly magical rituals through force of habit, reinterpreting them as reenactments of mythical events. Finally, humans come to realize nature follows natural laws, and they discover their true nature through science. Here again, science makes myth obsolete as humans progress "from magic through religion to science." Segal asserted that by pitting mythical thought against modern scientific thought, such theories imply modern humans must abandon myth. The earlier 20th century saw major work developing psychoanalytical approaches to interpreting myth, led by Sigmund Freud , who, drawing inspiration from Classical myth, began developing
25265-437: Was designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States in alignment with efforts to promote and protect the cultural diversity of the United States and recognize it as a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. The term folklore contains component parts folk and lore . The word folk originally applied to rural, frequently poor and illiterate peasants. A contemporary definition of folk
25428-558: Was established as part of the WPA . Its goal was to offer paid employment to thousands of unemployed writers by engaging them in various cultural projects around the country. These white collar workers were sent out as field workers to collect the oral folklore of their regions, including stories, songs, idioms and dialects. The most famous of these collections is the Slave Narrative Collection . The folklore collected under
25591-525: Was first articulated by the folklorist Walter Anderson in his monograph on the King and the Abbot published 1923. To explain the stability of the narrative, Anderson posited a “double redundancy”, in which the performer has heard the story from multiple other performers, and has himself performed it multiple times. This provides a feedback loop between repetitions at both levels to retain the essential elements of
25754-550: Was not progressing either toward wholeness or toward fragmentation. Individual artifacts must have meaning within the culture and for individuals themselves in order to assume cultural relevance and assure continued transmission. Because the European folklore movement had been primarily oriented toward oral traditions, a new term, folklife , was introduced to represent the full range of traditional culture. This included music , dance , storytelling , crafts , costume , foodways and more. In this period, folklore came to refer to
25917-478: Was posited that the stories, beliefs and customs were surviving fragments of a cultural mythology of the region, pre-dating Christianity and rooted in pagan peoples and beliefs. This thinking goes in lockstep with the rise of nationalism across Europe. Some British folklorists, rather than lamenting or attempting to preserve rural or pre-industrial cultures, saw their work as a means of furthering industrialization, scientific rationalism, and disenchantment . As
26080-616: Was primarily concerned with the natural world. It tended to interpret myths that seemed distasteful to European Victorians —such as tales about sex, incest, or cannibalism—as metaphors for natural phenomena like agricultural fertility . Unable to conceive impersonal natural laws, early humans tried to explain natural phenomena by attributing souls to inanimate objects, thus giving rise to animism . According to Tylor, human thought evolved through stages, starting with mythological ideas and gradually progressing to scientific ideas. Müller also saw myth as originating from language, even calling myth
26243-529: Was profoundly shaped by emerging ideas about evolution . These ideas included the recognition that many Eurasian languages—and therefore, conceivably, stories—were all descended from a lost common ancestor (the Indo-European language ) which could rationally be reconstructed through the comparison of its descendant languages. They also included the idea that cultures might evolve in ways comparable to species. In general, 19th-century theories framed myth as
26406-542: Was then adopted in Middle French as mythologie . Whether from French or Latin usage, English adopted the word "mythology" in the 15th century, initially meaning 'the exposition of a myth or myths', 'the interpretation of fables', or 'a book of such expositions'. The word is first attested in John Lydgate 's Troy Book ( c. 1425 ). From Lydgate until the 17th or 18th century, "mythology" meant
26569-950: Was to emphasize the study of a specific subset of the population: the rural, mostly illiterate peasantry. In his published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of older, mostly oral cultural traditions still flourishing among the rural populace. In Germany the Brothers Grimm had first published their " Kinder- und Hausmärchen " in 1812. They continued throughout their lives to collect German folk tales to include in their collection. In Scandinavia , intellectuals were also searching for their authentic Teutonic roots and had labeled their studies Folkeminde (Danish) or Folkermimne (Norwegian). Throughout Europe and America, other early collectors of folklore were at work. Thomas Crofton Croker published fairy tales from southern Ireland and, together with his wife, documented keening and other Irish funeral customs. Elias Lönnrot
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