Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays (New Perspectives in Folklore, Vol. 2)

282 Pages·1995·16.665 MB·English

by  Cathy L. Preston

FOLKLORE, LITERATURE,
AND CULTURAL THEORY
NEW PERSPECTIVES IN FOLKLORE
VOLUME 2
GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF THE HUMANITIES
VOLUME 1395
DRESSING THE DRAGON.
From Juliana Horatia Ewing's The Peace Egg and a Christmas Mumming Play
F O L K L O R E, L I T E R A T U R E,
A ND C U L T U R AL T H E O RY
COLLECTED ESSAYS
EDITED BY
CATHY LYNN PRESTON
First published by Garland Publishing, Inc.
This edition published 2013 by Routledge
Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square, Milton Park
New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN
Copyright © 1995 by Cathy Lynn Preston
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Folklore, literature, and cultural theory : collected essays / edited by
Cathy Lynn Preston.
p. cm. — (Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol.
1395. New perspectives in folklore ; vol.2)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8240-7271-5 (alk. paper)
1. Literature and folklore. 2. Folklore in literature. 3. Folklore.
I. Preston, Cathy Lynn. II. Series: Garland reference library of the humani
ties. New perspectives in folklore ; vol. 2.
GR41.3.F65 1995
809—dc20 95-13920
CIP
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction
Cathy Lynn Preston ix
PART I: THE LITERARY
1. Politics and Indigenous Theory in Leslie Marmon Silko's "Yellow
Woman" and Sandra Cisneros' "Woman Hollering Creek"
Alesia Garcia 3
2. Graffiti as Story and Act
Danielle M. Roemer 22
3. Folklore and the Literature of Exile
Mark E. Workman 29
4. Writing the Hybrid Body: Thomas Hardy and the Ethnographic
"Money Shot"
Cathy Lynn Preston 43
5. "Writing" and "Voice": The Articulations of Gender in Folklore
and Literature
Cristina Bacchilega 83
6. Social Protest, Folklore, and Feminist Ideology in Chicana Prose
and Poetry
Maria Herrera-Sobek 102
PART II: THE TRADITIONAL, VERNACULAR, AND LOCAL
7. "Sidebar Excursions to Nowhere": The Vernacular Storytelling of
Errol Morris and Spalding Gray
JohnD.Dorst 119
V
vi Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory
8. Shakespeare's Step-Sisters: Romance Novels and the Community
of Women
Clover Williams and Jean R. Freedman 135
9. Chuck Berry as Postmodern Composer-Performer
Peter Narváez 169
10. Pieces for a Shabby Hut
Lee Haring 187
11. Slave Spirituals: Allegories of the Recovery from Pain
Laura O'Connor 204
12. Re-presentations of (Im)moral Behavior in the Middle English
Non-Cycle Play "Mankind"
Michael J. Preston 214
13. Oralities (and Literacies): Comments on the Relationships of
Contemporary Folkloristics and Literary Studies
Eric L. Montenyohl 240
Notes on Contributors 257
Acknowledgments
Because this collection of essays took considerably longer to produce
than I had anticipated, I would like to thank the contributors to the
collection for their patience. I would also like to thank Garland
Publishing, and Gary Kuris in particular, for its continuing support of
folklorists' work. And I would like to thank Mike, Theresa, and
Stephanie for coping through my disappearing acts when I am writing.
vii
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Introduction
Cathy Lynn Preston
Placing questions concerning the politics of culture at the center
of literary and vernacular performances and of our readings of those
performances, the contributors to Folklore, Literature, and Cultural
Theory attempt to extend and, in some cases, to rethink current
discussions of cultural production. Focussing on the construction of
community and disjunctives within community and on questions
concerning identity politics and the possibility of "voice," contesting
boundaries previously drawn between the traditional and the
contemporary and between the oral and the written (and oralities and
literacies), exploring the negotiated and mutually appropriative domains
of local and larger-than-local cultural production as well as questions
concerning the politics of the authentic and the touristic—the following
essays seek to establish a cross-disciplinary dialogue between folklore
and literature and among folklorists, literary scholars, and cultural
theorists.
Such a collection of essays has been made possible and, indeed,
is necessitated by the disciplinary critiques that both folklore and
literature have undergone. Critique has, in large part, been instigated
by the field of cultural studies which, on the one hand, has forced
disclosures of the ways in which academic disciplines (as ways of
knowing) are embedded in socio-cultural power-relations and which, on
the other hand, has provided a meeting ground for cross-disciplinary
studies of variously situated performances by arguing that all forms of
cultural production—"the entire range of society's arts, beliefs,
institutions, and communicative practices" (Grossberg 1992:4)—need
to be theorized in relation to each other. As a result of critique,
English departments, for example, have "opened up" the traditionalized,
privileged literary canon in order to include literary performances of
people variously situated by gender, class, ethnicity, race, nationality,
and sexuality, as well as to include discussions of popular and variously
situated traditional, local, and vernacular performances ("vernacular" is
used here to designate that mixed field of mutual appropriations among
popular, traditional, and local communicative registers in their
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