ENGH 415: Folk Art and Folk Artists

ENGH 415-001: Folk Art and Folk Artists
(Fall 2012)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM M

Innovation Hall 207

Section Information for Fall 2012

Franz Kafka has famously said that a book is an ax for the frozen sea within. How more accurate to see any artwork as a portal of a kind through which we step, like Alice through the looking-glass, into worlds not our own and unimaginable by us, conjoining ourselves with persons not known to us.

-- Joyce Carol Oates, “The Writing Life: Tales Out of School” Washington Post, 16 March 1997

Artworks such as quilts and carvings, masks and costumes, festive foodways and treasured mementos do provide portals to worlds unimaginable to us, but they also enable us to re-envision those worlds we’ve grown up into and think we know well. To learn about traditional creativity and the forms it takes we’ll explore the lives and works of traditional artists. Why do members of our families hold fast to particular foods year after year? Why do we treasure mementos that have no worldly value and decorate our home altars and computer stands with them? What prompts European, African, Inuit, and Native American women to pick up their needles and create bursts of color with swatches of cloth? What propels a Vietnam War veteran to sculpt and paint scenes of the battles he’s survived? Why would a Maine woodsman spend his off-hours chain-saw-carving images of miniature loggers and giant bears? Why assemble a collage of flowers, signs, and personal items at a site along the road where a person died in an accident, or on a field near the Pentagon, September 2001?

In our semester together, we’ll use the lenses of biography and literature to explore the aesthetic characteristics, the communal bases, the tug of memory and tradition, and the behavioral and political impulses intrinsic to traditional arts and artists.

Texts include Neustadt, Clambake: A History and Celebration of an American Tradition; Chittenden, Vietnam Remembered: The Folk Art of Marine Veteran Michael D. Cusino; Turner, Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars as well as related articles, poems, short stories, and films. Requirements include take home examination questions, class discussion, and a semester project.

MFA students may submit a portfolio for their semester project.

[FML] [CS][All ENGL folklore and ethnography courses fulfill a Department of English literature requirement]

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Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Examines the traditional arts of everyday life, such as festive foods, mementos and other objects of memory, textile arts, pottery, carving in wood and stone, roadside shrines, and more. Explores the folk aesthetics of group-based creativity through the lenses of biography, history, literature, and folklore studies. Considers traditional objects as narratives in material form. Examples drawn from multiple cultures as well as traditions in students' own lives. Offered by English. Limited to three attempts.
Recommended Prerequisite: Satisfaction of University requirements in 100-level English and in Mason Core literature.
Schedule Type: Lecture
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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