Legends

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November 25, 2011

Rama for Beginners: Bridging Indian Folk and Comics Cultures

Posted by folkpub under Epic, Folktales, India, Legends, Material Culture, Popular Culture
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Rama for Beginners:  Bridging Indian Folk and Comics Cultures

Jeremy Stoll
Indiana University

Abstract:

In the boom of recent comics scholarship, the comic art of India has received little attention compared to that of other nations, the United States, France, and Japan in particular. Through a basis in religious and folk narratives, Indian comics narratives, especially those published by the Amar Chitra Katha series, have worked to update folk tales, retelling them in a modern medium. By looking at the figure of Rama in the Amar Chitra Katha and other Indian comics, this paper will analyze the process and implications of this transformation. In particular, the analysis of Rama as contemporary hero will reveal how these stories help people to deal with daily life at the same time that they affirm another, older way of understanding the world. This paper will thus demonstrate how comics creators in India have adapted the comic book to effectively re-maneuver traditional tales as a modern, folkloric inheritance to future generations.     (more…)

 

August 29, 2011

Mythic Narrative Performances: The Myth of the Kharisiri

Posted by folkpub under Latin America, Legends, Narrative, Performance
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Mythic Narrative Performances: The Myth of the Kharisiri

Vannessa Pelaez-Barrios
Indiana University

Abstract:

In this essay, I analyze and explore the linguistic and poetic dimensions of language used by people I interviewed about a mythic narrative with controversial content. Because of the nature of these oral narratives, performers have to position themselves with care to avoid misunderstandings in their narratives. The purpose of this paper is to understand that moments of speech are significant elements in ordinary social encounters. (more…)

 

April 12, 2010

Elizabeth Tucker. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Legends
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Elizabeth Tucker. Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. $50.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.

Jeffrey Tolbert
Indiana University

Popular volumes dedicated to ghosts and the supernatural typically consist of little more than anthologies of ghastly tales, divorced from the contexts in which they are told and presented uncritically as sources of frightening entertainment. This pattern echoes a broader trend of popular engagement with folkloric material, a textual obsession characteristic of earlier days of folklore studies that contrasts starkly with contemporary scholarly attitudes toward folklore, which focus on such concepts as context, performance, and other theoretical issues that deemphasize the bounded text.

In Haunted Halls, Elizabeth Tucker presents a collection of ghost stories gathered from American college students through interviews and emails. Unlike many popular anthologies, Tucker makes an appreciable effort to position each tale within a broad context (US college campuses), to elaborate on the history surrounding many of the stories, and to provide some commentary on the social and cultural implications of the tales. (more…)

 

March 24, 2009

Gerbilling Reconsidered: Comparing Talk of Foodways and Sexways

Posted by folkpub under Legends, Sexways
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Gerbilling Reconsidered: Comparing Talk of Foodways and Sexways

Christopher Lewis
The Ohio State University

Abstract
This paper considers the gerbilling legend of the early 1990s. The author contends that, by re-envisioning gay sex as gerbilling specifically rather than anal sex generally, heterosexual tellers of the legend grant themselves permission to participate in anal sex without participating in gay sex—a necessary function at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. He also contends that reading it against rumors and legends of ethnic foodways more conclusively reveals that the gerbilling legend primarily stigmatizes the gerbil as a sex partner, not the act of rectal insertion, and that therefore the legend is not necessarily anti-anal sex. Meanwhile, it appears to remain anti-homosexual because of how tellers separate themselves from same-sex desire even while embracing traditional homosexual sexways. The paper concludes with a queer approach to the story that reconsiders gerbilling as an acceptable sexual act.
(more…)

 

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