Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Audun Kjus
(Norsk Folkemuseum (The Norwegian Museum of Cultural History))
Jakob Löfgren (Lund University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- NARRATIVE
- Location:
- Room H-206
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel addresses the past and future of the study of narrative motifs, inviting discussions on the methods and theories involved and the empirical studies produced. How do we handle digitized archives and digital folklore genres? How do we respond to recent endeavours from other disciplines?
Long Abstract:
Since the mid-twentieth century, Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1955; 1958) and Antti Aarni and Thompson's Types of the Folktale (1961) have been powerful research tools of folkloristic enquiry, often considered fundamental in the study of folktales and popular narratives. In recent years interest in motifs have spread to a number of disciplines outside our own, from linguistics (Croft and Cruse 2004) and literature (Frontini et al. 2018) to bioinformatics (Darányi et al. 2012), and as a tool in digitalized, automatic text processing (Čech et al. 2017); sparking new debates and interdisciplinary discourse on the concept of motif and its usefulness in research.
Our panel seeks to address the past and future of the study of narrative motifs, inviting you to discuss both the methods and theories involved and the empirical studies produced. We welcome papers both in English and in Scandinavian languages, pondering questions such as:
• How has research on narrative motifs been conducted within folklore-studies, today and historically?
• How has research on motifs been conducted outside the discipline of folkloristics, and how can these approaches be used and understood as interdisciplinary tools and assets in future research?
• How does research involvement with the increasingly digitized folklore archives and the growing corpuses of digital folklore genres relate to the methodological tools and the cultural theories of narrative motifs research?
Join us in (re)visiting, revamping and (perhaps) revitalizing the continuous (re)search for motifs.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 June, 2022, -Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir (University of Iceland)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how new tales emerge from the roots of older ones, and how the old material is manifested in the new ones. The focus will be on context-specific narrative units in the Medieval Icelandic legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) that will be compared to Icelandic fairy tales.
Paper long abstract:
The paper explores how new tales emerge from the roots of older ones, and how the old material is manifested in the new ones. The focus will be on context-specific narrative units in the Medieval Icelandic legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) that will be compared to Icelandic fairy tales.
The comparison suggests that the narrative forms are significant and meaningful and cause us to read the stories from a variety of perspectives. For one, we do so, in light of past and subsequent events and in connection with the main characters, where the meaning of the semiotic unit is dependent on its context with other meaningful units of the same entity. For another, we understand the narrative units/motifs of the fairy tales in terms of the plot/progress, first and foremost. The suggested result, therefore, is that the signification systems of literary genres vs. oral narratives form audience expectations. Furthermore, the comparison shows that narrative units and motifs can be preserved in oral tradition and survive over a long period of time.
Risto Järv (Estonian Literary Museum) Mari Sarv (Estonian Literary Museum)
Paper short abstract:
In our paper we introduce the results of application of topic modeling to a regional selection of Estonian fairy tales and folksongs, and compare the results with the folkloristic typologies.
Paper long abstract:
The large volumes of folklore material collected in the tradition archives have required classification and systematisation for the materials to be findable and usable, and also for (and as a part of) the research of folklore. The classification typically takes in account elements of text and context - main characters, content, functions, ways of performance etc.
During the long course of the history of folkloristics voluminous collections of archival materials have been classified and systematised by reading the texts. The typological systems have been of help to get an overview of the material, as well as in classifying the new items. In the current digital age, and with the existence of large text corpora it seems more than natural that we would use the computer power for the classification task.
Nowadays, the classification and analysis of various everyday texts (news, social media feeds, etc) has become an everyday task in discovering the trends, tendencies, attitudes in society necessary for political as well as for business analysis. One of the methods used for computational classification is topic modeling - a method based on the language statistics that discovers the collections of the words that tend to regularly co-occur in various texts. This collection of words, named topic, can be easily comparable with folkloristic term of motif.
In our paper we introduce the results of application of topic modeling to a regional selection of Estonian fairy tales and folksongs, and compare the results with the folkloristic typologies.
John Moe (The Ohio State University)
Paper short abstract:
I focus on the bas relief wood carving by Elijah Pierce (1892-1984) investigating the extent to which African American folk material cultural materials draw on traditional narrative belief motifs (Aarne –Thompson motif-index), existent in the Black community historically and contemporaneously.
Paper long abstract:
I focus on the artistic wood carving by Elijah Pierce (1892-1984) and investigate the extent to which African American folk material cultural draws implicitly upon traditional narrative belief motifs. I use the Aarne –Thompson motif-index to explain images in Pierce’s painted wood relief carvings and demonstrate the impact of historic folk motifs.
Elijah Pierce was a treasured citizen in his local Columbus African American community, an esteemed church member, a successful barber, a well-known artist, and a revered neighbor people respected for his talents and wisdom. The manner in which he synthesized these roles in the Black community was a measure of his innate intelligence. Notwithstanding his lack of formal education, Pierce drew upon traditional narrative motifs in his art. By the time of his death at 92, Pierce was recognized nationally as an important African American artist whose work was widely exhibited. Pierce received the National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
From the 1930s, Pierce carried a walking stick where he carved images of his life and the community. When I interviewed Pierce, he referred to this cane as his “Preaching Stick”. I show carved images on the cane that relate to the Aarne-Thompson Motif-Index, for example: D867 “warns of Death” and D1322; “magic power of seeing Death at head or foot of bed” D1825.3.1; “white rose the symbol of death”, Z142.1; and “staff of life and death” E64.1.1. My research on folklore by the African American artist Pierce demonstrates the use of narrative motifs.