Analytic Essays in Folklore

Description

First edition, Second printing 1979. The following essays appeared originally in diverse journals and reflect my principal research interests, which, generally speaking, focus upon the analysis of folklore. For too many years, the discipline of folklore has overemphasized collecting and classifying its materials to the point where questions of analysis have inevitably been postponed. The reader may disagree with the types of analysis I use, namely, structural analysis as a means of rigorously describing the nature of folkloristic data, and psychoanalytic insights I have attempted to apply to folklore so as to bring unconscious content into consciousness. I am well aware that neither structural analysis nor psychoanalysis are widely accepted by American folklorists. But even if the reader does not share my theoretical biases, I would hope that he would at least admit that the field of folklore is in dire need of new analytic methods. The relatively few considerations of folklore theory which exist in the literature prove upon examination to be little more than rehashes of the nineteenth century concern with historical reconstruction, typically by using a form of the comparative method. Title Acknowledgments Foreword Contents Preface Section One: Folklore Theory and Method 1. The American Concept of Folklore 2. The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory 3. The Study Of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation 4. Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore 5. Metafolklore and Oral Literary Criticism Section Two: Structural Analysis of Folklore 6. From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales 7. Structural Typology in North American Indian Folktales 8. On Game Morphology: A Study of The Structure of Non-Verbal Folklore 9. The Structure of Superstition 10. Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle 11. On The Structure of the Proverb Section Three: The Psychoanalytic Approach 12. On The Psychology of Collecting Folklore 13. Earth-Diver: Creation of the Mythopoeic Male 14. Summoning Deity Through Ritual Fasting 15. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Grail 16. On the Psychology of Legend Section Four: The Analysis of American Folklore 17. Here I Sit - A Study of American Latrinalia 18. On Elephantasy and Elephanticide 19. The Number Three in American Culture 20. Thinking Ahead: A Folkloristic Reflection of the Future Orientation in American Worldview Bibliography Index Backmatter