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10. Applications of Folklore
- Utah State University Press
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c..hapter 10 AWLIl:ATION'5 OF FOL"LO~f, "APPLIED FOLKLORE" IS SEEN BY SOME ACADEMICS AS TOO PEDESTRIAN. ESPECIALLY for those who believe academic scholarship and research ought to be untainted by practical considerations, the concept has had the same ring that "applied art" or "applied literature" might have. It seems to smack of job rather than profession , of problem solving rather than theoretical speculation, of the immediate live world rather than the library. It stresses doing more than thinking and talking , and the academy has always been uneasy about such subordination of its central role. I like to encourage students to pose ofeverything they study the hypothetical question, "So what?" That is, what is it good for? What does it tell us that we needed to know? What does it open up for us? How does it help us to understand something? "So what?" is not meant to be belligerent or cynical, but to serve as a kind of field test to see if a mental exercise has paid off. As a student , I once listened to a long, detailed lecture about the real persons on whom Chaucer might have based the figure of the Knight in The Canterbury Tales. At the end, I could not come up with an answer to "So what?" beyond the simple observation (which the professor could have made in one sentence) that Chaucer may have had a live person in mind. But why did students need to know that or think about it? It did not seem to expand our appreciation of Chaucer's art, or our understanding of The Canterbury Tales, or our command of medievalliterature . Now, it may have been my fault or the professor's that there was no adequate answer for my question, but it remains unanswered to this dayfor me, anyhow. On the other hand, if we read Jan Harold Brunvand's study of Shakespeare 's use of a folktale type in The Taming of the Shrew and then ask "So what?" there is an answer: we now can see that since Shakespeare used folklore as well as his own genius, we need to deal with both before we can make either broad or specific pronouncements about Shakespeare's art. Which parts are his ?'1o p..Vt'LIC.MION'5 OF FOL\(LO\Z.£ and which parts are the people's? How, and how appropriately, did he use the folklore, and with what presumable effects on the audience (since they, no doubt, recognized the material)? In how many plays did he do it? These questions should lead us to some important perceptions about Shakespeare's art and its meaning. And we can go back over the work of earlier critics who did not think to look at the folklore deeply enough. What do we know now-what can we say now-that improves our abilities to respond to Shakespeare's dramatic art? These are real payoffs, not mere mechanical tinkerings, yet they are derived from an application offolklore study and theory to an existing field ofstudy, in this case literature. This is not to say that folklore is an automatic antidote for dull classes, but that in any area, the perspectives of another field may be applied to particular problems with more than respectable results. The lecture "Who Was Chaucer's Knight Really?" was not pointless just because it did not deal with folklore, but because it did not apply any real perspective to a real problem: it did not lead to a richer view of the work. Rather, it added yet more painstaking and detailed information to the already heavy pack ofdata being lugged around in the minds of young scholars. One might as well have a dissertation on the identity of the original travelling salesman, or of Kilroy; if the treatise helps us avoid dealing with what is funny in the jokes, or with how the message "Kilroy was here" spread all over the world in a few years, it cannot stand up to the question "So what?" It is indeed strange that the amassing of facts often passes for real scholarship , while applying the facts' perspective to a problem is often thought of as a cheap shot. Additionally, I think we may suspect that there is sometimes a class issue lurking behind academic hesitation to try a practical application of scholarly perspective. It is as ifby gearing down their large professional views to the interests of people outside their disciplines, scholars feel they...