| hello moon. |
| tickling of thoughts.: 18 April 2003, 5:28 pm. |
| You know the reason we don't value our folklore and fairytales at an academic level is because they aren't really ours. They all came to us from the giant mishmash of people that we're made up of, and so they ended up getting translated out of their original tongue, and they came together as body of work at a point when printing was already an everyday sort of commonality. So they aren't really even ours to begin with and then they don't have the oral tradition behind them, so the specifific language and poetics just don't exist in them, or not to the extent that they do in say, Russian folklore/fairytales. They've got different genres of folklore separated entirely on the basis of metre. We hain't got that. But folklore in the US is still and interesting phenomenon, for example most of the fairytales that we consider "ours" are German fairytales, even though germans weren't the first people to "settle" the new land. And how closely all this is tied to history - for example, you really can't consider Native American folklore the primary genre of "American" folklore, no matter how rich and interesting it is. It's not in the traditions of the "Narod" . . . We can't have serious academic philological classes about the Oral Poetic and Creative Traditions.. But we've still got something to work from. Yeah, so I've got to write a paper. 15 pages typed in Russian. At least I've got something to start from. |
| dairyland::
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