ISSS 335A - The Nature of Oral Narratives: How and Why We Tell Stories

The course will focus on the nature of oral poetry and on the culturally specific ways of generating verbal art (ethnopoetics). Poetry (and oral poetry) has usually excluded narratives, which have been considered as “prose”. Recent studies have found that orally transmitted stories, tales and legends may be organized in ways that make them also a kind of poetry. The course will examine a variety of stories, the form they take, and their meanings to the people who tell and hear them. General questions about such narratives will be taken up (orality in relation to literacy, oral-formulaic composition and performance, parallelism as the main feature of poetry, and notions of the structure of narrative). (IR)

Credits: 3