Monday, February 11, 2008

Session 6: Folklore and Poetry

Don't forget that the facilitator and artistic response people from Where the Wild Things Are need to submit their second papers to the appropriate dropbox before session 6!

There's a lot of reading for next session because we'll be exploring two different genres: Folklore and Poetry.

Here are some questions to help you focus your reading:
  • Folklore: C & G, Ch 5 and Christensen (on Angel)
    • How is the genre defined? What makes folklore, folklore?
    • What are the differences between folklore and "fakelore"? What might those differences matter?
    • What sub-categories can we use to describe types of folklore?
  • Poetry: C & G, Ch 4 and Apol/Harris (on Angel)
    • How is the genre defined? How is it meant to be experienced? (Is this what we see in schools?)
    • How might we evaluate poetry? How might conventional understandings of form, etc. help us? (Scare us? Excite us? We'll spend some time unpacking our own histories with poetry!!!)
  • Why pair folklore and poetry? How are they similar? Different?
I've said this to each of the sections, but I want to reiterate: The quality of conversation in the class depends largely on you! Please come prepared, with copies of the readings! Preparing for class is part of your full participation in class!

2 comments:

Lauren said...

I've started reading the chapter in the textbook on folklore and I was excited to see it touch on ideas that I studied in more depth in my ENG 308 (Young Adult Literature) class that I took last semester, particularly on fairy tales. I'm going home this weekend and I plan to dig out some of the articles we read in that class about the relation between fairy tales, the human psyche, and cultural change. I have articles by both Bettelheim and Zipes who were mentioned in the textbook. Hopefully this can contribute to the discussion.

Valerie W. said...

I love it when student bring in material from other courses! I want to hear more about your YA class! (We do more and more adolescent and YA lit as the course progresses. TE 448 focuses even more heavily on books for older readers.)