The Folkloresque

Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World

Michael Dylan Foster, Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Michael Dylan Foster, Jeffrey A. Tolbert

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781607324171
• eBook ISBN: 9781607324188
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume introduces a new concept to explore the dynamic relationship between folklore and popular culture: the "folkloresque." With "folkloresque," Foster and Tolbert name the product created when popular culture appropriates or reinvents folkloric themes, characters, and images. Such manufactured tropes are traditionally considered outside the purview of academic folklore study, but the folkloresque offers a frame for understanding them that is grounded in the discourse and theory of the discipline.

Fantasy fiction, comic books, anime, video games, literature, professional storytelling and comedy, and even popular science writing all commonly incorporate elements from tradition or draw on basic folklore genres to inform their structure. Through three primary modes—integration, portrayal, and parody—the collection offers a set of heuristic tools for analysis of how folklore is increasingly used in these commercial and mass-market contexts.

The Folkloresque challenges disciplinary and genre boundaries; suggests productive new approaches for interpreting folklore, popular culture, literature, film, and contemporary media; and encourages a rethinking of traditional works and older interpretive paradigms.
 

Contributors: Trevor J. Blank, Chad Buterbaugh, Bill Ellis, Timothy H. Evans, Michael Dylan Foster, Carlea Holl-Jensen, Greg Kelley, Paul Manning, Daniel Peretti, Gregory Schrempp, Jeffrey A. Tolbert

Section 1

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Integration

Introduction

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JEFFREY A. TOLBERT

Heedless of disciplinary conventions, cultural theory, or academic claim staking, creators of popular culture have continually turned to folklore as subject matter. The abundance of folkloric themes and images within popular media and the tendency of scholars to focus their efforts on cataloguing these allusive uses of folkloric forms led folklorist Mikel Koven (2003, 181) to coin the term motif-spotting, by which he meant the study of specific, identifiable folkloric motifs as they appear in works of popular fiction.

The folkloresque mode of integration as an analytical category may begin with gestures toward motif-spotting, but it has the distinct advantage of privileging emic understandings over analytic ones. Our concern is not ultimately with whether a particular episode in popular media resembles an international tale type or exhibits a particular combination of motifs (although such correspondences clue us in to the presence of the folkloresque). Rather, the folkloresque enables us to move beyond identification to an integrated study of the thought processes, interests, and goals of creators as well as audiences of popular culture. In so doing we bypass what Koven (2008, 34) has elsewhere called the “folklore fallacy,” the tendency of creators of popular culture to trust uncritically in the “authenticity” of their folkloric background material. The folkloresque locates authenticity within the minds of the participants in popular culture. This enables us to understand how authenticity, and thus market appeal, are constituted and performed through popular media. The first step in this process is to determine how popular audiences conceive of folklore, and why such a conception should matter at all. Studying the folkloresque allows us to interrogate popular cultural forms that either imitate or allude to “real” (that is, known, extradiegetic) folklore, moving past the easily digestible “folksy” layers to understand why this film or comic book or novel succeeds in conjuring a sense of the folklorically familiar.

We echo S. Elizabeth Bird’s call to scholars to pay attention to what matters to popular audiences: “So we need to forget about whether or not popular culture ‘transmits’ folklore. Rather, we begin to consider that certain popular forms succeed because they act like folklore . . . Thus popular culture is popular because of its resonance, its appeal to an audience’s existing set of story conventions” (Bird 2006, 346). This resemblance to existing forms of storytelling is the core of the integrative mode of the folkloresque and remains powerfully appealing to popular audiences, similar in effect to what Margaret Dean-Smith (1968) once called “folkery.”

The contributors to this section explore the use of familiar (or seemingly familiar) folkloric material as a technique through which the creators of popular culture play with received notions of tradition and traditional forms, especially narratives. These creative individuals reassemble and redeploy disparate motifs and imageries, forming new, contemporary creations that nevertheless hearken back to “olden times,” to fairy tales, legends, and myths long familiar to audiences.

This is the case with Miyazaki Hayao’s film Spirited Away, which Michael Dylan Foster, in the first chapter of this section, examines in light of its strategic but “fuzzy allusion” to established folkloric motifs and characters (Miyazaki 2001). The film combines fragments of “real” folklore in such a way as to create an entirely new narrative, one that is independent of the real-world traditions on which it apparently draws. Foster shows that seeming to be folklore is as much a part of the folkloresque as is the straightforward recycling of actual motifs and tale types.

In the second chapter, Tim Evans explores the works of popular author Neil Gaiman, whose use of folklore is both complicated and complicating: it makes integrative use of countless folkloric motifs even as it challenges received notions about what folklore is and how it functions in an increasingly complex social world. For Gaiman, Evans argues, the issue is ultimately the elucidation of universal elements of human experience, which “must be pursued, and re-created from” all forms and periods of culture, folk and otherwise. Equally intriguing is Gaiman’s explicit use of the work of real-world folklorists, including Richard Dorson and Benjamin Botkin. By relying on these scholars, Gaiman offers both implicit and explicit commentary on the nature of folklore itself and, by extension, on the value of folklore study.

Paul Manning describes, in the third chapter, how local folklore can be strategically assimilated into burgeoning popular literary movements. Through a close examination of the works of Anna Eliza Bray, Manning shows how the pixies, local supernatural creatures from Devonshire and Cornwall in England, were reframed as part of the larger fairy faith that was becoming a fashionable Victorian literary topic. Whereas the folkloresque can enable the recombination of folkloric elements into new popular forms, Manning shows how it can also highlight (or manufacture) compelling points of contact between new modes of thinking among the educated elite and preexisting localized expressions of folk belief. The political potential of the folkloresque is, in such instances, abundantly clear.

While the integrative aspect of the folkloresque is often self-evident within examples of popular culture, Daniel Peretti demonstrates in this section’s final chapter how the folkloresque process can operate bidirectionally. Peretti considers the folkloresque framing conventions used by the creators of a popular comic book superhero, offering a valuable survey of the scholarly literature on comics and illustrating the many ways in which Superman comics in particular draw on established folkloric narratives. He goes on to describe compelling examples of the folkloresque Superman as the character moves from the pop cultural medium of comics into a more conventionally folkloric environment, adopted and redeployed by fans in the form of narratives, jokes, costumes, and more.

In every case explored in this section, the integrative aspect of the folkloresque serves to alert audiences to the presence of something they may recognize, something either culled directly from their own vernacular knowledge/experience or else appealing indirectly, through similarities in structure and form and flavor, to that area of cultural experience that is felt to be (often ineffably) folk. This final point—the feeling of folklore, the perception of something’s relationship to the folk qualifier—is perhaps the most important dimension of the folkloresque in all its modes. Creatively ignoring scholarly misgivings, the folkloresque foregrounds popular conceptions of folklore that reveal the changing significances people ascribe to it.

References

Bird, S. Elizabeth. 2006. “Cultural Studies as Confluence: The Convergence of Folklore and Media Studies.” In Popular Culture Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction, 344–55. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Dean-Smith, Margaret. 1968. “The Pre-disposition to Folkery.” Folklore 79(3): 161–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.1968.9716593.

Koven, Mikel J. 2003. “Folklore Studies and Popular Film and Television: A Necessary Critical Survey.” Journal of American Folklore 116(460): 176–95. http://dx.doi.org /10.1353/jaf.2003....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque
• Section 1: Integration
• Section 2: Portrayal
• Section 3: Parody
• About the Authors
• Index