ENGH 591: Topics in Folklore Studies

ENGH 591-001: Folk Arts 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]

Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

Explores folklore and folklife topics such as folk narrative and story telling, folklore and literature, folksong, and folk arts. Notes: May be repeated when topic is different. Offered by English. May be repeated within the term for a maximum 12 credits.
Specialized Designation: Topic Varies
Registration Restrictions:

Enrollment limited to students with a class of Advanced to Candidacy, Graduate, Junior Plus, Non-Degree or Senior Plus.

Enrollment is limited to Graduate, Non-Degree or Undergraduate level students.

Students in a Non-Degree Undergraduate degree may not enroll.

Schedule Type: Lecture
Grading:
This course is graded on the Graduate Regular scale.

The University Catalog is the authoritative source for information on courses. The Schedule of Classes is the authoritative source for information on classes scheduled for this semester. See the Schedule for the most up-to-date information and see Patriot web to register for classes.