III. Insert the missing words.

1. Its … character is emphasized in relation to its research techniques.

2. Polish folklore studies have always been free from ideological ….

3. Such possibilities reveal common … of living in the modern world.

4. The anthropological school wanted to see the entire range of peasant activity as “…”.

5. The broad field of research includes … folklore and … folklore.

6. The fourth approach is devoted to the … character of folklore.

7. The periodical Etnolingwistyka is a forum for the exchange of … ideas.

8. The scope of study also included the relationships between … text and … forms of expression.

9. The second approach focuses on collecting … materials and editing texts.

10. Two … have appeared in postwar Polish studies of folklore.

 

IV. Insert the missing prepositions.

1. The first trend involves the philological approach … folklore as a verbal art.

2. It began to grow … popularity … about the same time as the philological school.

3. The focus is shifted … the “archaeology” … folklore … contemporary forms … its existence.

4. The first approach has developed … … historical-philological studies.

5. It deals … the history … folklore studies.

6. Polish folklorists are open … scholarly communication … both Eastern and Western Europe.

7. The fourth approach is devoted … the oral character … folklore.

8. The “Wroclaw school” exerts a strong influence … other Polish academic centres.

9. We can point … four main approaches.

10. Today, these kinds … folklore occur … the level … symbolic culture.

ADDITIONAL PRACTICE

 

I. Skim the text to find out the prospects and limitations of folklore scholarship.

RESEARCH IN FOLKLORE

If folklore as a discipline focuses on tradition only, it “contradicts its own raison d’etre ”. If the initial assumption of folklore research is based on the disappearance of its subject matter, there is no way to prevent the science from following the same road. If the attempt to save tradition from oblivion remains the only function of the folklorist, he returns to the role of the antiquarian from which he tried so hard to escape. In that case, it is in the interest of folklore scholarship that we change the definition of the subject to allow broader and more dynamic research in the field.

The same applies to the notion of oral transmission; an insistence on the “purity” of all folklore texts can be destructive in terms of folklore scholarship. Because of the advent of modern means of communication, folklorists who insist upon this criterion actually saw off the branch they are sitting on. They inevitably concentrate upon isolated forms and ignore the real social and literary interchange between cultures and artistic media and channels of communication. In reality, oral texts cross into the domain of written literature and the plastic and musical arts; conversely, the oral circulation of songs and tales has been affected by print. This has long been recognized, and yet it has been a source of constant frustration for folklorists who searched for materials uncontaminated by print or broadcast.

The notion of folklore as a process may provide a way out of this dilemma. Accordingly, it is not the life history of the text that determines its folkloristic quality but its present mode of existence. On the one hand, a popular melody, a current joke, or a political anecdote that has been incorporated into the artistic process in small group situations is folklore, no matter how long it has existed in that context. On the other hand, a song, a tale, or a riddle that is performed on television or appears in print ceases to be folklore because there is a change in its communicative context.

This definition may break away from some scholarly traditions, but at the same time it may point to possible new directions. A major factor that prevented folklore studies from becoming a full-fledged discipline in the academic community has been the tendency toward thing-collecting projects. The tripodal scheme of folklore research as collecting, classifying, and analyzing emphasizes this very point. This procedure developed as a nineteenth-century positivistic reaction to some of the more speculative ideas about folklore that prevailed at that time. Since then, however, the battle for empiricism has been won twice over.

Folklore scholarship – which developed since the rejection of unilinear cultural evolutionism and the solar and psychoanalytical universal symbolism – has had its own built-in limitations and misconceptions. These resulted in part from the focus on facts. Because of the literary and philological starting point of folklore studies, the empirical fact was an object, a text of a tale, song, or proverb, or even an isolated word. This approach limited the research possibilities in folklore and narrowed the range of generalizations that could be induced from the available data.

It might have been suitable for Krappe’s notion of folklore as an historical science that purported to reconstruct the spiritual history of man, but it completely incapacitated the development of any other thesis about the nature of folklore in society. Consequently, when social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology came of age, they incorporated folklore into their studies only as a reflection and projection of other phenomena. Folklore was “a mirror of culture” but not a dynamic factor in it, a projection of basic personality, but not personality in action. Once viewed as a process, however, folklore does not have to be a marginal projection or reflection; it can be considered a sphere of interaction in its own right.

(adapted and abridged from D. Ben-Amos Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context)

 

II. Summarise the text.

III. Read the text and define its main idea. Translate the text in writing.