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.
Author(s): Alan Dundes
Series: Studies in Folklore, 2
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: Mouton Publishers
Year: 1979
Language: English
Pages: 280
City: The Hague
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
