Where Have All the Hoaxes Gone?

As folklorists know, one way to gain understanding of a group is through the folklore they produce. In this essay, folklorists are the group, and the hoaxes perpetrated by and on them, or the lack of such hoaxes, offer some insight into the culture of folklore studies. Looking at a series of alleged hoaxes, including the Tasaday tribe, MacPhearson's Ossian, and Leland's Aradia, the essay probes folklorists' desire to believe and disbelieve. Folklorists have historically proven difficult to hoax, to intentionally deceive, but that disciplinary skepticism may come with a cost.

White Folks: Literature’s Uncanny, Unhomely Folklore of Whiteness

This chapter looks at moments of constructed uncanniness and unhomeliness in Russell Banks’s Affliction and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, two American novels in which whiteness is inextricably linked to the creation, through acceptance or rejection, of folk groups. Using critical race theory, this chapter argues that the tendency to exempt the literature of white writers from dominant conversations about folklore and literature helps reaffirm a dangerous hierarchical system of power in which whiteness is marked as absence. It argues through a close read of fiction that whiteness is not absent—instead, it is an identity which is guarded and negotiated through negotiations of folk groups. Banks and Welty both construct a whiteness that has stability and variation, that reacts to the presence of a folk Other, and that becomes part of a vernacular language of identity for those inside, outside, and on the borders of their groups.

Misanthropelore

Using examples form the comics of Daniel Clowes, this chapter considers the roots, manifestations and expressive dimensions of disaffiliation. Focused as it is on the shared aspects of expressive culture, mainstream conceptualizations of folklore struggle to assess how individuals creatively convey the absence of belonging. Richardson uses Daniel Clowes’s comics in order to assess and analyze the performance of disaffiliation. In each instance, misanthropelore is not necessarily about a lack or loss of shared identity, which is how conventional folklore scholarship approaches it; misanthropelore, rather, is a refusal of shared identity through the creative expression of absence.

On Fanfiction and the Amateur/ Professional Divide

One of the primary criticisms of fandom and fanfiction writers is that they are trespassing on grounds best left preserved for the “professionals.” Their very existence threatens the boundaries between expert and amateur, between trained artists and “usurpers.” This chapter surveys the debates surrounding the proper place of fanfiction and other fan-produced work in the hierarchy of both folklore studies and artistic production in general, arguing that such debates are an interesting corollary to discussions about fraudulent folklore and the amateur folklorist.

Folklore in Vacuo (and Other Disciplinary Predicaments)

In the form of a lyric essay, this chapter interrogates the motives and methods of mainstream folklore scholarship. The author identifies a variety of factors that discourage folklorists from taking more expressive chances in order to understand the specialized style that has come to dominate folklore scholarship. This hyper-professionalization of folkloristic writing has, the author argues, led to what Benjamin Botkin once called “folklorists talking to themselves or folklore in vacuo.” In order to make folklore studies resonate with a broader audience, the author calls for folkloristic writing that is more imaginative and less thesis-driven, writing that invites the curious in rather than excluding them in the name of scholarly prestige.

Check Snopes: Cyborg Folklore in the Internet Age

“Check Snopes” has become the clarion call of doubters everywhere, from the chalkboard to the chat room. Yet Snopes.com also presents an interesting problem within folklore studies, a problem common to folklore’s relationship with the internet. Certainly Snopes.com demonstrates a breakdown of the clear lines between academic scholarship and popular scholarship, but it points towards other breakdowns as well: between single authorship and community production, between what folklorists study and folklore itself, between human and machine.