John Berquist
Streetwise: New Words and New Usage from South Side Chicago
Teens
For the past four years, John Berquist has worked with youth in the After School
Matters Program in the Chicago Public Schools. Using examples on video, he will
showcase stories from Chicago's South Side collected and performed by his students.
The stories cover a wide range of experiences, from street encounters to changed
family recipes, and are expressed in many forms, such as rap, poetry, and tales.
Itzik Gottesman
Narratives from the Midwest in Yiddish Literature
This talk will examine the short stories of Yiddish writers living in the Midwest,
mainly Chicago, from the 1920s to 1960s and look at how their new way of life
in America is reflected in their work. Most of these writers simultaneously
wrote about the “old country” in Eastern Europe. Their “old
world” and “new world” narratives will be compared, with special
attention to cultural contacts with the non-Jewish world in both contexts.
Holger Kersten
Special English for Special Purposes:
The Cultural Relevance of German- American Literary Dialect
Examples of German-American literary dialect were ubiquitous in nineteenth-century
American culture. By providing an overview of this rich tradition and by placing
it within its proper cultural context, this paper attempts to show that unconventional
constructions, mixed metaphors, and thought-dissociations were not a sign of
cultural inferiority but rather opened paths for new and different kinds of
aesthetic experiences and created a challenge for the predominance of standard
English as a vehicle of literary expression.
Kathrin Pöge-Alder
Storytelling in a Multicultural Society or Preserving Tradition?
Immigrant Storytellers in German-Speaking Europe
Based on interviews with immigrant storytellers in 1998–1999 in German-speaking
areas of Europe, this talk focuses on the storytellers themselves. Emphasis
is on how storytellers deal with their own migration experience, tales of other
cultures, and adaptation of their non-German oral tales to a German-speaking
audience. The evolution of traditional tales told by new generations of storytellers
will also be analyzed.
August Rubrecht
How DARE Can Help You Understand
and Appreciate Storytelling and Folklore
The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
provides resources for anyone interested in stories and the language people
use to transmit them. The dictionary can help folklorists and storytellers define
and pronounce words they find in archival materials. Perhaps of even more interest,
DARE maintains a collection of tape recordings from more than 2,000 localities.
These tapes were made by DARE fieldworkers from 1965 to 1970 primarily to develop
a phonological and lexical archive to supplement written questionnaires, but
they also preserve a wealth of information about local lore, including personal
and traditional narratives. As a DARE fieldworker in 1967 and 1968, August traveled
to Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Delaware, and upstate New York. Anecdotes
from those travels illuminate rural/urban, rich/poor, and Anglo/Cajun/African-American
ways of relating to an outsider.
Theresa Schenck
Memories of Contact
This presentation will review and analyze some of the oldest contact stories
from Ojibwe and Cree sources.
Harold Scheub
An Egyptian Tomb, a Mbuti Myth, a Xhosa Epic, and an Appointment
in Havana: A Storytelling Odyssey
Storytellers have been around from the beginning: they are the artists who give
shape and meaning to our world. They reproduce fragments of reality and, coupling
these fragments with the images of the past, they reconstruct reality. In fact,
there is no reality without the storyteller. Story is the only way we can understand
our world. Does this mean that story is truth? Put it this way: story is the
only truth that we have.
Christoph Schmitt
European Folk Culture in the Fiction of the New World:
The letter-based Novel Jürnjakob Swehn Travels to America
For nineteenth-century immigrants from the region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
emigration was an extraordinary event that required ritual and narrative processing.
Above all, narration took place through the medium of the personal letter, the
only means of communication between the “Old” and “New”
Worlds. The 1917 novel Jürnjakob Swehn, der Amerikafahrer
provides the most prominent example of a novel compiled from letters written
by Mecklenburg emigrants. Author and folklorist Johannes Gillhoff (1861–1930)
based his novel on the correspondence of his immigrant father with more than
250 people from his father’s home region.
Jack Zipes
To Be or Not to Be Eaten: The Survival of Traditional Storytelling
Traditional storytelling has its positive and negative aspects. It has been
cultivated to bring about a cultural identity and foster a sense of community.
But it has also been used to blind people to the realities of social and political
conditions and to maintain conservative religions and the status quo in communities
and nation-states. Traditional storytelling survives in various forms today,
and because the stories are so diverse and storytelling techniques so disparate,
it offers a challenge to contemporary storytellers and critics with regard to
the purpose and choices in their work. I think the major question we must ask
is: How can traditional storytelling survive today without devouring children?
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