Traditional Folktales Research Articles

Oral History and Revenge in Annie Proulx's "The Half-Skinned Steer"

Stories are the recordings of history and serve as reminders of personal and cultural struggle. In The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition, Gisli Sigurdsson writes that before the development of written language, oral history "became a kind of knowledge bank" (57) in which stories of success, as well as those of tragedy, were retold to subsequent generations. A study conducted by Daniel Bertaux and Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame concludes that "earlier generations may very well determine the shape of the trajectories of future genera­tions through what it passes on to them [. . .] for the purpose of generating foreseeable conduct" (87). While this study provides evidence that positive behaviours may be transmitted to descendents, it also implies that destructive acts may be channelled through history and generate foreseeable negative conduct. The pain of struggle, revenge, and retaliation arises from behaviours which may be perpetuated across many generations; often the original source of the feud is forgotten, yet a desire for vengeance persists.The originating concept for Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx's story "The Half-Skinned Steer" is, as the author notes, "based on an old Icelandic folktale, 'Porgeir's Bull'" (Proulx 10). Proulx's reconfiguration of the themes of revenge within this tale demonstrate how 'old' thinking can slow progress and resurrect long-forgotten grievances. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", the author relocates and remodulates the traditional folk tale to address particular issues and behaviours - work ethic, diet and vengeance - within the setting of the contemporary American West. This article will examine the ways in which Proulx reconfigures the Icelandic folktale "Porgeir's Bull" to explore intersecting themes of persistence, human arrogance, and nature's revenge on man.

Les « Cantari » et la tradition écrite du conte populaire

The folktale written tradition has obscure origins. Folktale is a very old and very widespread literary genre which, originally, belonged only to purely oral tradition. With very few exceptions, it takes on written form relatively late, according to current opinion, with Straparola (1550-53) and Basile (1630-34). This article attempts to demonstrate, by contrast, that the written tradition of folktales has in fact its origins in Italy, but almost two centuries before the Piacevoli Notti. It began, in the second half of the XIVth century, with the cantari, little poems of popular taste, in ottava rima, which, for the first time in European literature, systematically explored the folktale tradition, and borrowed from it a large number of narrative frameworks. Tales such as Liombruno, Bel Gherardino, Campriano and so on, are, from every point of view, real folktales in literary form : they opened the way from Marchen to literature, and enjoyed great success for several centuries, deeply influencing both literature and popular narrative.

More Statistical and Methodological Myths and Urban Legends

The study of urban legends represents the application of concepts developed in the academic study of traditional folktales to stories circulating in the modern world. Vandenberg adapted the notion of ‘‘urban legends’’ into the area of organizational research methods and coined the term statistical and methodological myths and urban legends (SMMULs) to refer to the collection of various rules of thumb and other ‘‘received doctrines’’ that often guide researchers’ scientific behavior. Various SMMULs have been examined over 7 years in a number of symposia at scientific conferences, in a previous Feature Topic in Organizational Research Methods (2006), and in an edited book. This Feature Topic continues this tradition by presenting five new SMMULs.

Introduction: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy

Introduction: The European Fairy-Tale Tradition between Orality and Literacy Dan Ben-Amos (bio) In fairy godfather: straparola, venice, and the fairy tale tradition, Ruth Bottigheimer proposes to correct the historical narrative of the emergence of the fairy tale in Europe and to recognize “Straparola’s role as an originator in the history of modern fairy tale” (Bottigheimer 2002:3). Giovanni Francesco Straparola (c. 1480–c. 1557) is not exactly an unknown figure in folktale history.1 His book, Le piacevoli notti (Pleasant nights), which appeared in English as The Nights of Straparola (Straparola [1551–1553] 1894), was long recognized as a predecessor of Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti (The tale of tales; published 1634–1636; also known in its 1674 edition as Il Pentamerone) and Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mere l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose; Perrault [1695–1697] 1956). As Bottigheimer (2002:2) points out, the Grimm brothers considered Straparola as their precursor, admiring him as an author who conscientiously drew upon oral tradition. Selections from Straparola’s tales appeared in volumes published in Vienna in 1791, which included twenty-four tales, and in Berlin in 1817, which included eighteen tales and was accompanied by the copious notes of the editor and translator Friedrich Wilhelm Valentine Schmidt. In the mid-nineteenth century, Theodor Benfey found in the case of Straparola implicit support for his theory of the Indian origin of folktales. For him, the availability of Straparola’s tales was felicitous evidence for the possible historical interdependence of oral and literate tales. Since the idea that oral tradition alone could sustain a global diffusion of tales was unfathomable in his days, he relied on the migration and translation of the Panchatantra, a classic Indian tale collection, as a support for his Indian origin hypothesis (Benfey 1859). The availability of a European tale collection that demonstrated the possibility of such historical interdependence provided him with further support for his theory. In her book, Bottigheimer rekindles Benfey’s conception of literature as inspiration for oral storytelling, and she proceeds to attribute to Straparola a far greater role in the history of the folktale. She argues that he was not merely a link in the back-andforth transitions between oral storytelling and literature but was an original literary innovator who created a new, previously unknown folktale form—the “rise tale.” Associated with this form, and thematically central to it, is the narrative role of a magical benefactor in human or animal guise; Bottigheimer considers this narrative figure to be Straparola’s literary invention as well. In her view, Straparola acted as an [End Page 373] agent of a newly rising urban middle class and expressed in his “rise tales” its socioeconomic aspirations. While the consideration of folktales as a reflection of social and cultural values has been a staple of folklore research, the proposition that a literary writer originated a folklore form, and created a new narrative role to go along with this form, is revolutionary for the field. Such a clear, precise, and well-defined proposition, which is limited to a specific literary-historical case, could be tested like a scientific hypothesis. Karl Popper proposed that a scientific system “require[s] that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical tests, in a negative sense: it must be possible for an empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience” (1959:41). Although Bottigheimer formulates her hypothesis in descriptive rather than logical terms, in her challenging study she offers a rare opportunity for testing a proposition that concerns a critical period in the history of the folktale: the era of the print revolution (see Baron, Lindquist, and Shevlin 2007; Eisenstein 1979, 1983). This was a period in which chapbooks, pamphlets, broadsides, and other forms of popular printing entered the domains of the marketplace, the family room, and the coffeehouse, as well as the community hall and bar, where oral entertainment previously ruled. Regarding the European folktale tradition, print also changed the rules of historical evidence and entrapped folktales in a historical paradox. Chronologically, many literary tales pre-date the recordings of their oral counterparts. In fact, it is...

Structure and Motif in the ‘Innocent Persecuted Heroine’ Tale in Vietnam and Other Southeast Asian Countries

Through a study of structure and motifs in the innocent persecuted heroine tale in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, this article argues that although folktale traditions across the world share the same plots, themes, and motifs, the function and significance of plots and motifs may perform differently in local cultural contexts. Folktales originate in a time at some distance from the present, and may contain traces of various archaic modes of thought and custom that accrue as social apparatuses change. By focusing on the different structure of the innocent persecuted heroine tale type in Vietnam and in other Southeast Asian countries, and making a comparison with other tales of the same type in other cultures, the article explores some historical layers contained in these tales. The article also offers an explanation for the existence of this unusual structure and confirms the cultural uniqueness of apparently international structures and motifs.

The Indomitable Giuseppe Pitrè

Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), who was a medical doctor, professor, and senator in Sicily, was one of the most gifted and significant folklorists of the nineteenth century. However, very little is known about his life and works. This essay is an endeavour to explore the significance of Pitrè's vast production as a collector of Sicilian dialect tales and a scholar of Sicilian customs and traditions. In many respects, Pitrè's major work, Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani [Sicilian Fairy Tales, Folktales and Stories] of 1875, is the culmination of the great European folklore scholarship that began earlier in the nineteenth century. In fact, Sicily was a haven for folktales that stemmed from both the European and Middle Eastern cultures. Against the cultural grain of his times, Pitrè dedicated himself to the Sicilian people and their customs and produced volumes of folktales that shed more light on the oral tradition of folktales than the works of the Brothers Grimm or any other collectors in the nineteenth century.

Tainted Sources: The Subversion of the Grimms' Ideology of the Folktale in Heinrich Heine's Der Rabbi von Bacherach1

Like Germanistik, the nascent discipline of Volkskunde played a central role in shaping the discourse of German nationalism.2 No one contributed more to defining the parameters of both disciplines than Jacob and Wilhelm most popularly known both in their own day and in ours as the compilers of the Kinder- und Hausmarchen (KHM). Not only were the Grimms' Marchen themselves widely disseminated, but so were their accompanying remarks on folktales as a form of what they, following Herder, call Volksdichtung or Volkspoesie. While the writings of the Brothers Grimm articulate various theories to explain how folktales are transmitted, their preface and introduction to the second edition of the KHM of 1819 advance the influential concept of a pure German folktale tradition passed down to their time. Over the last thirty years, scholars have underscored this strong nationalist current in the Grimms' writings on folktales and other forms of folk expression.3 Surprisingly, though, they have neglected what is arguably the most trenchant critique of the Grimms' nationalist ideology of the folktale: Heinrich Heine's fragmentary novelDer Rabbi von Bacherach, the first chapter of which was composed in 1824, two years after the completion of the second edition of the KHM. The present study explores the terms of Heine's critique, and in the process maps out the discursive field of the folktale in the first half of the nineteenth century as a highly contested terrain. I begin by delineating the Grimms' ideology of folkloric purity as it is distilled in the second edition of the KHM, the edition in which, according to Heinz Rolleke, die 'Gattung Grimm' erst recht eigentlich geschaffen wurde (Rolleke, Zur Biographie 522). I then document Heine's reception of this ideology in Die Harzreise, which he drafted in the same year as the first chapter of Rabbi. Next, I show how the opening chapter of Rabbi depicts the translation of this ideology of folkloric purity into practice, with devastating consequences for the Jewish community of Bacherach. I claim that Heine's text radically subverts this ideology by showing folktale traditions to be always already exposed to what Jack Zipes has termed original from exogenous traditions (Zipes, Cross-Cultural 869). While Rabbi is primarily concerned with the dynamics of diasporic folk culture, that is to say, with the ways in which the Jews of Bacherach intermingle folktales from the dominant community with their own to create hybrid forms, Heine's text suggests that the wellsprings of the host community are indelibly tainted as well. Examining this contamination will lead us both to employ and to question key theoretical assumptions of current diaspora studies. In their preface (Vorrede) and introduction (Einleitung) to the second edition of the KHM, the Brothers Grimm envision a pure stream of folkloric transmission running down to their day, or what Jacob in the preface to his Deutsche Mythologie, terms nie stillstehende Flus lebendiger Sitte und Sage (cited in Bausinger, Formen 24). As they depict it, this stream issues from a purely German source; it carries exclusively German content; protected from outside influences, its course from one generation to the next remains unbroken; finally, it is faithfully preserved by the Brothers Grimm themselves in their KHM. Taken together, these stages amount to a comprehensive ideology of a pure German Marchen tradition. The attribution of a nationalist ideology to the Grimms' writings on folktales has been disputed by Heinz Rollecke, whose critical editions of the KHM have paved the way for contemporary research into the Grimms' collection. In an article on the Marchentheorien der Bruder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, Rollecke argues that the Grimms counterbalance any nationalist tendencies with a far stronger internationalist bent (67). He goes so far as to read the absence of the adjective deutsch from the title of their folktale collection as an indication of the extent to which they were aware of the internationality of their tales (68). …

The "Beauty Myth" Is No Myth : Emphasis on Male-Female Attractiveness in World Folktales.

The phenomenon of apparently greater emphasis on human female physical attractiveness has spawned an array of explanatory responses, but the great majority can be broadly categorized as either evolutionary or social constructivist in nature. Both perspectives generate distinct and testable predictions. If, as Naomi Wolf (The beauty myth: How images of female beauty are used against women. New York: William Morrow, [originally published in 1991], 2002) and others have argued, greater emphasis on female attractiveness is part of a predominantly Western "beauty myth," then an analysis of a culturally diverse sample should reveal marked fluctuation in gendered attractiveness emphasis: there should be significant numbers of cultures in which male and female attractiveness are equally emphasized, and cultures in which male attractiveness receives more emphasis. On the other hand, an evolutionary perspective suggests that disproportionate emphasis on female attractiveness will be a universal or near-universal phenomenon. To test these hypotheses, we tallied references to male versus female attractiveness in 90 collections of traditional folktales from 13 diverse cultural areas. The results are consistent with the evolutionary predictions and inconsistent with the constructivist predictions. Across culture areas information on physical attractiveness was much more likely to be conveyed for female characters. Together with other recent studies, these results suggest that the main elements of the beauty myth are not myths: there are large areas of overlap in the attractiveness judgments of diverse populations, and cross-cultural emphasis on physical attractiveness appears to fall principally upon women.

De-composition in Popular Elizabethan Playtexts: A Revalidation of the Multiple Versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet

De-composition in Popular Elizabethan Playtexts:A Revalidation of the Multiple Versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet Lene Petersen (bio) Recomposition and De-composition in Playtexts and Folk Texts When Grimm's folktales returned to the folk, they tended to become purified and in many ways have again approached the abstract style that was weakened by Wilhelm Grimm. According to the Swiss folklorist Max Lüthi (1986:110-11), a rendition of the Cinderella tale narrated by a North German farm worker "restores the sort of progression of clearly defined elements (Steigerung) that strives for clear and simple visibility and that had become effaced in Grimm's mistier, more poetical phrasing . . . in oral tradition it corrects itself." The aim of this article is to establish some premises for comparing the transmission of playtexts of the early modern stage with the transmission of folk material. My central question is whether playtexts and ballad and tale texts "de-compose" in similar ways, and, if they do, whether we may then predict a similar "goal product" that can only be achieved through transmission. The detailed comparison of traditionalized ballads and Elizabethan playtexts is still a relatively uncharted field of inquiry, and this article thus simultaneously revisits and supplements the few observations published in this field so far. In the quotation above, referring to the traditional folktale Cinderella, Lüthi stresses the power of oral tradition to correct, simplify, and make visible the narrative aspects that aesthetic/authorial composition complicates or obscures in a recorded text. The final product of transmission Lüthi called the Zielform,1 meaning "goal form." He saw the notion of the Zielform as relating both to the transmission and form of folk tales and folk epic, and his research, most of which was carried out in the 1960s and 1970s, assumes that under the right auspices a given story will transform according to certain expected (and hence predictable) corrective "laws" as it evolves and multiplies into different versions. During this process the tale may be zurechterzählt, "told into shape," or possibly zerzählt, meaning "dis-told," or "told out of shape." Either way, the mutation process that a given story undergoes in tradition is seen to be positive and necessary to the formal survival of that story. Cecil Sharp's view of the evolutionary adaptability of the traditional folk ballad was similar (1923:38): In the evolution of species of the animal and vegetable worlds, those variations will be preserved which are of advantage to their possessors in the competition for existence. In the evolution of folk [songs] . . . the corresponding principle of selection is the taste of the community. Those . . . variations, which appeal to the community, will be perpetuated, as against those which attract the individual only. By using examples of variant versions of traditionalized English broadside ballads alongside the multiple-text Shakespearean plays Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, I hope to illustrate how a similar selective mechanism can be detected in the transmission of early modern playtexts. I also want to illustrate how the formative importance of transmission is made apparent in such texts through the generation of certain identifiable stylo-structural features. Given that I shall be referring recurrently to the terms "transmission" and "tradition" in this article I should like clarify from the start what I mean by those terms in relation to popular stage plays. By the transmission of playtexts, I mean the long-term interaction between stage-performance and print distribution over time, in the sense described by Adam Fox (2000:5). Tradition, then, is defined as the equally time-dependent accumulation of identifiable textual witnesses (extant and lost) produced by transmission. Thus recordings of the Hamlet story in various playtexts formats (octavo, quarto, folio), along with related forms such as plots, parts, and play summaries in table books and diaries, all belong to the tradition of Hamlet, as do ballads of the kind referred to as "residuals" by Bruce R. Smith. In "Shakespeare's Residuals," published recently in a collection of essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, Smith argues that there is a sustained relationship of cultural residuality between Elizabethan stage plays and ballads, suggesting that plays and ballads enter...

African Video Film Arts Festival, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

October 28-31, 2007 I was invited to be a discussant at this two-day conference held at Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University, the 140-acre campus near the brownroofed, medieval town of Ile-Ife. All screenings and panels took place in the spacious, cool auditorium of Oduduwa Hall, a beautiful, gargantuan building of black and white architecture, built in 1960 with round holes cut into large flat walls set amidst floating, wide, cement staircases and multiple terraces. This conference was targeted to be the first in an annual series, focused on African video and film arts. Though work from other countries on the continent was screened, from the outset opinions clustered around the muchmaligned, much-adored Nigerian video industry, also known as Though twenty years old, the Nigerian video industry is a frontier world and poses remarkable possibilities around economies, national identity, and a new renaissance of the film industry working with today's destructions, reconstructions, and technologies. The conference looked beyond Nollywood. It called up an examination of consciousness with open questions about identity, art forms, and colonial impact. Younger people vocally challenged the idea of a precolonial character that could be found intact. The welcome address by conference organizer, Dr. Foluke Ogunleye, set a practical, enthusiastic tone. She encouraged a new perspective of this video industry, currently Africa's largest-as a foundation on which to rejuvenate cinema. The Nigerian video world is very profitable, very multiple in its sources, production values and quality, and is very international, exporting around the world. It is an in-house national product, which finances its own pictures and recycles its profits quickly. Its major backers are scrap-metal businessmen, so its economy is hands-on and financially canny. Ogunleye pointed out that art already exists in these popular videos as well as messages of Africanness and that, easy as it is to dismiss the videos as shallow and poorly made, they nevertheless hold the seeds of a future African, specifically Nigerian, cinema, one both lucrative and artistically successful. The indigenous structures of identity and prosperity are there: many of these videos are in languages (Yoruba and Hausa), many are built on traditional folktales or on the young men's fiction of the 1950s Onitsha market literature, and the industry itself arose from the illustrious Yoruba theater, whose players needed work when the economy (and the theater) collapsed in the 1980s and so turned to video acting. It also owes much to the Mexican and Brazilian soaps that have engrossed television viewers for decades. This makes the Nigerian video industry a special mishmash of global culture, oral and epic folk culture, routine culture, television culture, and new culture. Many contemporary features and documentaries from Senegal, Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda as well as classic Nigerian videos, such as Tunde Kelani's Thunderbolt (2001) were screened. The students loved the torrid Ghanaian youth soap opera Caravans of Dreads, made by twentysomething director, Sam Atsu Akbo, as both amusing and hip, and, equally loved and hip, the gentle Mee (2006), a spiritual documentary on finding one's self, by Ugandan nun, Sister Dominica Dipio. Ogunleye wanted students to see films on a large screen and in a large audience as few had experienced this. In most countries, movie houses are almost nonexistent, often too difficult or dangerous to get to, too costly and not worth the hassle of leaving home when a TV screen will do. This important detail allowed the phenomenon of film history and its reliance on the big screen to hover in the conference. In every approach to a revived film industry were debates about identity per se, about identity as the basis for new cinema, about Yoruba, Hausa, or Igbo traditions as the crux of a Nigerian film culture, and about the future of celluloid versus digital or video. …

My American Uncle, America Cries Uncle, and Other Fantastic Tales from France: Iegor Gran's Jeanne d'Arc fait tic-tac

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's proposal that beliefs about nations often crystallize in the form of stories could serve as both summary and generative matrix for Jeanne d'Arc fait tic-tac. In keeping with a number of recent fictional works united by the attempt to understand French and American cultures in a comparative context, the first part of Iegor Gran's clever 2005 novel consists of eleven stories whose common focus on the danger represented by American culture for French national identity makes the second part of the novel, in which France declares war and invades the United States, almost inevitable. In the opening section of Jeanne d'Arc, Gran both rewrites the traditional folktale for a self-reflective postmodern age and revises and satirizes the conventions of fantastic literature. The primary comic strategy of the second half of the novel, constructed as a parody of the current American conflict in Iraq, pays homage to the most recent source of tension between the United States and France. Throughout the novel Gran caricatures French chauvinism and insularity as much as he mocks American arrogance and consumerism, and the metaphorical demise of the oncle d’Amerique,” the specifically French version of the American dream, continually reminds us of the sheer power and pleasure of narrative. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss1/2 My American Uncle, America Cries Uncle, and Other Fantastic Tales from France: Iegor Gran’s Jeanne d’Arc fait tic-tac Carolyn A. Durham College of Wooster Dis-moi qui te hante, je te dirais qui tu es. Tell me who haunts you and I’ll tell you who

Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (review)

Reviewed by: Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre David L. Russell (bio) Zipes, Jack . Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. New York: Routledge, 2006. Readers acquainted with Jack Zipes' voluminous body of work on folktales will find many familiar themes in this latest contribution—particularly his belief in the power of folktales to transmit cultural values and mores, and his conviction that society can best be characterized by the abiding conflict between oppressors and the oppressed. But if the material is at times predictable, it is, nevertheless, provocative and, occasionally, compelling. This is a weighty tome in several ways—delving deeply into psychology, historical scholarship, and literary theory, it is also replete with a multitude of footnotes and a lengthy bibliography. At times, impeded by a less-than-facile writing style, the narrative is bogged down with paragraph-long lists of titles that might better be relegated to notes or the bibliography. Some readers will undoubtedly find the jargon a bit off-putting. And there are signs of careless editing, such ascribing the work of Perrault and Mme. d'Aulnoy to "1790" and "eighteenth century" when it surely should have read "1690" and "seventeenth century"—and the error is repeated several times across two pages, causing at least momentary confusion (68–69). On another occasion, he shifts the spelling of a character's name from Morrell to Morel (182–83). In a work so filled with minutiae, such oversights are bound to occur—of course, one wonders how many others went unheeded. The initial chapters review the history of what Zipes calls the literary fairy tales—which, in his definition, includes any tale that has been committed to the written page (he goes back to Boccaccio and earlier), as opposed to a tale that is the original creation of a writer, as it is so often defined. His conclusion is that it is impossible to find a pure "fairy" tale or pure "folk" tale, since all have been "contaminated" through "cross-cultural and intercultural exchange" producing a myriad of variants (43). These cultural variants are what chiefly concern him in this study. Much of this material he has covered elsewhere—as he himself points out. In chapter 1 he resurrects a discussion of "Little Red Riding Hood," then provides a survey in chapter 2—"The Evolution and Dissemination of the Classical Fairy Tale." It is only in chapter 3 that he actually begins with the examination of specific tales and gets to the heart of the book as suggested by its title. His interest is in looking at modern-day variations of the best-known folktales to show how they have been adapted to twentieth- and twentieth-first-century lifestyles. For readers interested primarily in children's literature, one caveat should be offered: many of his examples are drawn from adult literature, including story writers, playwrights and novelists, and many [End Page 299] are drawn from the cinema, the opera, and the ballet. The purpose of this eclectic mix seems to be to illustrate the breadth and depth of the cultural influence of the traditional folktales—a fairly widely accepted notion. What Zipes brings to the study is his own wide reading in the fairy tales and his well-known political and social viewpoints. So Cinderella is seen as a tale of the personal conflict that faces people when placed in situations requiring them to act contrary to their natural biological drives—as, for example, when a stepparent is asked to nurture another's child. This, Zipes sees, as an unnatural situation, one that threatens to undermine the stepparent's own self-interests (which would be to favor his or her own child, no matter how unpleasant that child may be). Zipes concludes that Cinderella "became contagious and stuck . . . because it was addressing issues of child abandonment, family legacy, sibling rivalry, and parental love" (115). Whether one agrees with Zipes or sees his conclusions as overreaching, his discussions are filled with thoughtful and provocative observations. Chapter 3 closes with a review of several modern adult versions of Cinderella, including one featuring a gay prince charming, one with a lesbian Cinderella...

14th Annual African Film Festival (review)

14th Annual African Film Festival Ina Diane Archer (bio) New York City, 04 04- 1204 20- 2105 25- 28, 2007 Celebrating its 14th year, the New York African Film Festival continues to exemplify the Film Society of Lincoln Center's commitment to international cinema. Annually, programmer Mahen Bonetti expands perceptions of African people, culture and cinema, articulating the artistic commonalities of the continent while identifying regional distinctions. In this year's festival, modernity versus tradition, African identity, immigration and exile, effects of war, and women's empowerment were explored through forty-seven features, spanning sub-Saharan Africa, Northern Africa and the Diaspora. 2007 commemorates the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence (the 1st sub-Saharan nation to gain sovereignty) by "reflecting back" on liberation struggles and the painful legacy of colonialism. Striking thematic use was made of French, British, Russian and African archival newsreels documenting the Pan-African quest for self-rule. Dating from the 1950s/60s, the fragments (many sequences are only 1–2 minutes long) are narrated in the voice of both empire and of travelogues. Viewed retrospectively, the paternalistic rhetoric ("Good luck to Kenya in her new role!") and colorful descriptions are poignant. Named with such titles as "Africans Get Authority" (SA, 1959), "Africans Demand Liberation" (GH/GN, 1958), these films record optimistic, nascent liberation movements, many of which subsequently failed. Known players appear: the diminutive Haile Selassie in epaulettes; Mobutu, in his leopard hat; Kenyatta and the brutalized Patrice Lumumba over whose face is a haunting commentary: " . . . feel that he is dead . . . failing of the UN forces . . . civil war that will go on for years." These colonial antiques were fascinating in relation to the self-representation in African-made films such as Testament(GH, 1988), John Akromfrah's meditation on pessimism after the Nkrumah regime, [End Page 206]which layers newsreel soundtrack over scenes of a returned exile negotiating an altered political landscape. The iconography of "independence"—briefcases, sunglasses, military pomp, "native" ceremony—resurfaces in two allegorical films: Kongi's Harvest(GH/US, 1970) directed by Ossie Davis, adapted from Wole Soyinka's play, and in Fanta Maria Nacro's Shakespearean Night of Truth(BF, 2007). Made thirty-seven years apart, both are set in fictional African countries where a crucial ceremony ignites conflict between the goal of unification and the maintenance of tribal identity. In Kongi's Harvest, at the Celebration of the New Yam, a megalomaniac dictator, played by Soyinka (resembling Malcolm X and Lumumba), vows to coerce the people into unity. Lacking the poetry of the play, Kongi's Harvesthas a fun, retro, afro-modernist style including patterned, animated titles by designers Chermayeff & Geismar. Night of Truth, conversely, critiques the peaceful, Pan-Africanist accord that sacrifices ancestral identity through an intense, theatrical story which builds to a violent conclusion. A festival highlight was the retrospective of Nacro's entertaining and socially conscious shorts: the seminal A Certain Morning(BF, 1991), a cinematic collision between Africa and Europe; Puknini(BF, 1995), a playful critique of infidelity; an AIDs fable, Konate's Gift(BF, 1998); and Bintou(BF, 2000), which unfolds like a Lubitsch musical, propelled by a xalamas the abused Bintou, seeking to finance her daughter's education, receives a friendly "micro-loan" to start a millet-sprouting business. Familial harmony prevails, with a happy ending of (women's) economic independence. Clouds Over Conakry(Cheick Fantamady Camara, GN, 2007) premiered, showing affluent Guineans grappling with both tradition and rising Islamic fundamentalism as a father pressures his son to become an imam. Paris Selon Moussa(GN/FR, 2003), starring director Cheik Doukouré, chronicled a resourceful villager detained in Paris who joins immigrants seeking sanctuary in a church. Both films are engaging but each ends with sudden tragedy that borders on melodrama. Also premiering was Max and Mona(Teddy Mattera, SA, 2004), a screwball comedy touching on soccer, transgender and the criminal underworld, whose quirky South African characters are never reduced to caricature. Daniel Taye Workou's short, Menged(ET, 2007), based on a traditional folk tale, satirizes Ethiopian issues, including the paternalism of international aid, as a father and son travel by mule (and vice versa!) to market. Another short from...

"Sweet Sorrow": The Universal Theme of Separation in Folklore and Children's Literature

Traditional folktales and classic children's literature present abandoned girls who not only achieve independence, but they also suggest the dominant gender's survival is itself dependent upon the "weaker" sex. Abandoned girls don't need someone to take care of them; rather they need someone to take care of. But if this were simply a matter of surrogate mothering, it could be accomplished by caring for a little sister or a female friend. Instead, it is a male who needs to be cared for, protected, or rescued. Furthermore, these males are not just children, but also adults.

Evaluation of automatic generation of basic stories

This paper presents an application that automatically generatesbasic stories: short texts that only narrate the main events of the plot. The system operates with a representation in Description Logics, combining stored fabulas with the narrative knowledge implemented in a domain-specific ontology. The domain of application is the traditional folk tale, using the well-known morphology of Vladimir Propp as narratological background. In order to evaluate the results, human judges blindly compared one of the generated basic stories to two alternatives: one rendered directly from a stored fabula of the knowledge base and another randomly generated. As a conclusion, possibilities of measuring the utility of the system in terms of quality and originality of the generated artifact are discussed.

Contemporary Legends from the Slovene Karst in Comparison with Fairylore and Belief Traditions<br>Sodobne zgodbe s slovenskega krasa na Notranjskem v primerjavi z lokalnim bajčnim izročilom in tradicionalnim pripovedništvom</br>

The paper presents narratives collected in the last decade in the Karst region in southwest Slovenia, more precisely in Lož Valley with its Snežnik Castle and its forests, in the vicinity of Cerknica Lake, and in the region of Pivka. Although most of these stories can be defined as contemporary legends they do have much in common with traditional folk tales and with local mythology. The analyzed legends mention ghosts, witches, fairies, and other mythological creatures from Slovene traditional mythology; their content has been changed considerably, and they are usually narrated as personal experience, which is a characteristic of contemporary legends. On the basis of exact comparison and the study of context the author tries to outline the changes in contemporary folk narrative and the social function of both genres of narration according to the circumstances in which they have been recounted.

The Heroine with a Thousand Faces: Universal Trends in the Characterization of Female Folk Tale Protagonists

Literary scholars and psychologists have long remarked striking similarities in the depiction of male heroes in the world's folk tale traditions. The best-known attempt to document and explain these similarities is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1936). Campbell's work differs in detail from other prominent attempts to define universal features of heroes, however its grand thesis is much the same: while the details of heroes “faces” may change as the investigator crosses geographical, ethnic, cultural and chronological borders, certain details of the hero's life and challenges are everywhere the same. However, in contrast to the many determined efforts to generalize about heroes, scholars have expended little effort generalizing about cross-cultural features of heroines. The present article, based on a quantitative content analysis of folk tales from 48 culture areas around the world, represents the first systematic attempt to identify and explain cross-cultural trends in the characterization of heroines. This study was designed to improve substantially on previous attempts to define literary universals by drawing upon theory and methods used by human scientists to fruitfully explore and explain human universals.

The unwritten textbook of the folktale: A case study of 'Morongwa le Morongwanyana' (The Messenger and the Small messenger)

This article explores the unwritten textbook of the folktale in the case of “Morongwa le Morongwanyana” [The Messenger and the Small messenger], a South African folktale recorded and published by A.T. Malepe. Against the background of current problems with the folktale tradition, it is argued that the unwritten textbook can help improve three educational practices, namely the practice of educating children at home, the practice of teaching and learning at school, and the practice of educational mass media. The nature and content of the unwritten textbook of the Batswana culture as defined by Ong (1982) and other scholars on orality are examined in a case study of the selected folktale. Lastly, the implications of the case study and of the unwritten textbook for the three practices are spelled out.

Sex differences in mate choice criteria are reflected in folktales from around the world and in historical European literature

This article reports results of a multiple-coder content analysis of the mate preferences of characters in two different sources of literary data: 658 traditional folktales from 48 different culture areas and plot and character summaries from 240 works taken to be representative of Western literature. This study represents an attempt to extend some of the mate preference findings of Buss [Behav. Brain. Sci. 12 (1989a) 1] in a large data set of non-Western, preindustrial populations. A prominent criticism of Buss was that a preponderance of data was gathered from Western or westernized societies and, as a result, it was not possible to rule out the conclusion that regularities in mate preferences resulted from cultural transfer rather than from evolved sexual psychology. By including information derived from band, tribal, and preindustrial state populations, the current study attempts to address concerns based on the possibility of cross-cultural transfer.

Legend and vvetland landscape in Ireland

Ireland has a large body of archaeological monuments and artefacts associated with water and wetlands, and this is mirrored by a large corpus of legends and lore in the folk tradition dealing with supernatural creatures which inhabit wetlands, lakes and rivers. Some of these are part of a wider European tradition of legends and folktales. There is a tendency in the Irish tradition to treat wetlands as dangerous places, and part of this might have stemmed not only from an attempt to warn people away from unfamiliar landscapes, but also to warn against interfering with otherworldly or supernatural places.