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Swapping Stories: Folktales
from Louisiana
Edited by Carl Lindahl,
Maida Owens, and C. Renée Harvison
Outline for Students of
"Louisiana Folktale
Traditions: An Introduction," by Carl Lindahl (To read the entire introduction,
click here.)
Additional current southern
folktale collections, including contemporary Louisiana tales
-Showcase narrative variety
and cultural diversity
-Presented as a written record
of oral taletelling, not as edited literary works
-Barry Ancelet's Cajun
and Creole Folktales (1994)
-John Burrison's Storytellers:
Folktales and Legends from the South (1991)
-James P. Leary's Midwestern
Folk Humor (1991)
-W. K. McNeil's Ghost
Stories from the American South (1985)
Federal Writers' Project,
1930s-1940s
-Writers hired to collect
folktales
-Collectors often edited
and reworked stories
-Reflected bias of writers
-Reflected stereotypes of
cultural groups and dialects, or folk speech
-Changed oral style to literary
style
-More journalism than folklore
scholarship
Problems of recording and
preserving storytelling authentically
-Requires face-to-face communication
-Features a small audience
in a natural context, or setting
-Oral traditions feature
spontaneous gestures and vocal changes, unlike written tales
-Displays subtle regionalisms
-Changes in each telling,
shaped in part by the intimate audience
Contemporary retelling of
folktales
-Folklorists: Work in universities,
museums, and arts and humanities organizations
-Seek to understand folktales
as integral parts of a traditional storyteller's daily life and
folk culture
-See storytellers as guardians
of artistry, values, and cultural communities
-Include background and story
context
-Record stories exactly as
told and seek to preserve them in archives, publications, and
restaged public presentations such as festivals
-Performers: Perform onstage
before large audiences as part of current popular trend
-Interested in acquiring
new material, thus often the tale is more important than traditional
storytellers and their communities
-Memorized performance told
the same way every time, often in a theatrical manner
Swapping Stories: Folktales
from Louisiana (1997)
-Presents current Louisiana
folktale exactly as they were recorded
-Furnishes some context,
or background, for each teller and universal motifs, or themes,
for each story
-Represents a diverse array
of cultural groups from different parts of Louisiana
-Every folktale reflects
three influences
Individual style--depends
on age and experience of narrator
Cultural style--conditioned
by the shared values and experience of the community
Generic style--shaped by
the genre, or type, of oral narrative, each of which has its
own conventions, or traditions
-Offers and defines a wide
range of traditional oral narrative genres, or types
personal experience stories
tall tales
historical tales and legends
belief legends and ghost
stories
jokes
magic tales
animal tales
trickster tales
myths and aetiological or
"why" stories
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