ENGH 412: Topics in Folklore Studies

ENGH 412-001: Appalachian Folklore
(Spring 2012)

04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R

Innovation Hall 215G

Section Information for Spring 2012

More than a century ago scholars, writers and journalists began capturing the national imagination with accounts of largely fictive realm set in the southern mountains. This course explores the production of folk culture in American society from two perspectives: first, as a cultural practice of "othering," whereby elite or dominate groups marginalize particular populations in space and time by assigning "folk" attributes to them; and second as a continually emerging body of tradition that resists that social location and marginalization. We will use phenomenological theory, along with neo-Marxist models of culture and society to examine the case of Appalachia.

Questions we will address include: How have images of cultural difference in literature, film and journalism and political rhetoric supported the domination of Appalachia? How do these images square with the identities mountain communities achieve for themselves through oral literature, music, architecture, craft and ritual? How is America's national myth legitimized or challenged in the work of ethnographers, filmmakers, journalists and writers? How is the struggle for control of natural resources and cultural images unfolding elsewhere in the "developing" world, and how does today's management of natural resources (e.g., coal mining, the Marcellus Shale natural gas reserve) benefit from 19th Century images of the "folksy" Appalachia?

Course Information from the University Catalog