COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

ENGLISH 332: INTRODUCTION TO FOLKLORE. This course introduces students to the study of folk culture through the study of the cycles of our lives. Life's circles surrounds us and support us in everything we do: from the cradle to the grave and from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. "To everything there is a season," Ecclesiastes once observed, but he left to our own imaginations how things begin and how they end, or, rather, how we know they begin and end. Our understanding is informed by any number of networks of ideas, but some of the most powerful are those that we find only in the things that we do and say. Examining the things that people say and do to understand how they imagine their world is the focus of this course. Students are introduced to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches along the way.

ENGL 335: LOUISIANA FOLKLORE. Someone once called Louisiana a "folklore land" and we do live in a state, and in a region of the state, where folklore not only abides happily but is the subject of a great deal of attention by scholars and citizens, tourists and natives. This course encourages students to take a closer look for themselves not only at the folklore that surrounds and swathes each of us but also at the various ways it has been and is currently being represented. Course texts include Mardi Gras, Gumbo, and Zydeco and Cajun Country, but we will also be reading short stories and a novel, watching a few films, reading the newspaper as well as going out and seeing for ourselves what there is and how we might represent it to others. This course is writing intensive and requires some fieldwork.

ENGL 432: AMERICAN FOLKLORE. In a perspective that reverses the scope of anthropologists, who study the things people do and say in order to find something which they can call "culture," folklorists like to begin and end with the concrete: the stories themselves, the songs themselves, the objects themselves. What surrounds these stories, songs, and objects is what helps us to understand them, but like the people we study, our interest is primarily with the things. Folklorists have a hard time separating people and culture. Society is made up of people, culture of ideas. Ideas get around because people get around. People know how to get around from what they have learned. Imagination and reality are intertwined. This course explores how people have moved across the American landscape, and how we can know who they were or are by the record they have left or leave. The study of folklore opens doors onto culture, history, and psychology. Specifically, we will look at the peculiar (hi)stories of the Atlantic coast fishers, Appalachians, Cajuns, African Americans, and American Indians.

ENGLISH 449: ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH METHODS. This course is designed for students interested in grounding themselves in the basics of qualitative research, and is thus open to a variety of students with the only prerequisite being your interest in getting the most out of the field experience. The goal of this course is to lay out a number of straightforward steps that the researcher takes before, during, and after "going into the field." We begin with topic generation and selection, proceed through the tentative first steps of the actual field experience, to the all too important transformation of the field experience into information and knowledge communicable to various audiences. Assignments include observing, note-taking, interviewing, drawing, and writing. We discuss, and experiment with, a wide variety of documentary outputs: text, audio, photography, video/film. Students design their own research projects and outputs.

ENGL 482: FOLKLORE GENRES. Moliere's gentleman was surprised to learn that he was speaking prose. Imagine his reaction were to have known that he was also speaking in genres. Genres are not simply analytical categories, then, but actions, ways of "doing things with words." We tell stories to "pass the time" and we tell jokes to "break the ice." Much of this course will, for obvious reasons, focus on speech genres, but we will also take the opportunity to consider other kinds of conventional behavior and products: houses, meals, events. By the end of the course, students will be familiar with genres, various forms of classification, methods of description and analysis, ethnographic approaches to genres, and a lot of folktales, jokes, and other forms of traditional discourse.

ENGL 632: PROSEMINAR IN FOLKLORE STUDIES. This course is a survey of key concepts, problems, and perspectives in folklore theory and method, focusing on key moments, ideas, and texts in the evolution of folklore studies in order to acquire a “feel” for the foundations of the discipline. For the purposes of this course, the field is conceived fairly broadly and includes work done in adjacent fields like anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and literary studies. As much as it is possible, the readings are chronological, allowing us to follow the interactive dimensions of intellectual history, wherein one theory arises as a response to (extension of, corrective of, or refutation of) another theory. Mileage in such a chronology must vary, however, as some texts (usually those that awaited translation) are considered in the context of those texts they most influenced. The purpose of any proseminar is to acquaint students with the core texts or theories of a particular field of inquiry. Folklore’s diverse beginnings and many interrelations make it particularly difficult to gather all such materials into a semester of study. The aim of this course, then, is to familiarize you with those texts, thinkers, and ideas that seem central in light of recent developments in the discipline and to acquaint you with other texts, thinkers, and ideas so that you may begin to see these complex webs for yourself.