(Notes from 'Memory in Oral Traditions'. Everything is quotes. Line breaks added by me,
Pg
264
Ballads
of British origin are much as they were in the Old World, with minor
adoptions to the new culture and geography. They are more likely than
North American ballads to contain suspense, class distinctions,
pageantry and supernatural agents, and they usually have a greater
geographic distribution and popularity.
North
American ballads are more likely to have an explicit moral, to omit
descriptions of sex or shocking details even when they are central to
the story, to be about physical labour, and, because they are more
recent, to have their content more easily traced to an actual event
or single source.
(There is more of this kind of stuff under the break)
Pg
273
He
took her by her lily-white hand,
from stanza 13, is usually a rape or seduction formula, and in many
cases, including this one, can be a prelude to death. When the line
is followed by He lead her through the hall,
as it is here and in nine other ballads noted by Andersen, the sexual
act is minimized and it is usually a prelude to marriage. Thus this
simple concrete act is a way of indicating to those familiar with the
genre that Annet has been chosen over the brown girl by Lord Thomas
and that her death may be near (Andersen, 1985, pp. 161-174).
Pg
274
Annular
or ring structure or composition is common in ballads, epic, and
other oral traditions (e.g., Andersen, 1982; Gaisser, 1969; Niles,
1983, pp. 152-162; Stanley, 1993). Progress through a piece can be
viewed as a skewer traveling in a straight line through an onion,
piercing the skin, each layer, and the centre before continuing
through the same layers in reverse order before the skin is reached
again on the opposite side. Each layer entered provides the
expectation of a layer to be encountered again. Individual layers can
contain incremental repetition or other forms of organisation, making
the ring structure a flexible frame for a ballad.
In
computer terms, it is a push-down stack: first in, last out. Lord
(1991b) argues that although this pattern can be transformed into a
technique of literary rhetoric, it is a natural way for an illiterate
poet to compose orally. Momentary continuity of thought is maintained
by picking up the most recentlly dropped theme. In Havelock's (1971)
words, ring structures “are not patterns … but echoes” (p52).
Pg
282
It
is not just ballads that have these constraints. Cohen argues
effectively that many, but not all, of the constraints are part of
the larger culture and are reflected in the newspapers of the time.
For instance, in the press, Bryan started out as a lower-class woman
of the town, but became a young, trusting, girl as soon as the
coroner discovered she was pregnant. Unlike the ballad tradition, the
press presented both the murdered-girl pattern and the
criminal-brought-to-justice pattern, but kept them in separate
stories.
The
newspapers shared with the ballads not only the basic character types
and plot structures, but also the alliterative epithets “poor
Pearl” and “dreadful deed.” These practices may not have
diminished. An extension student enrolled at my university was
accused of posing as an heir to the Rothschild fortune. In the
headlines, he became the “bogus baron.”
Pg
291
Moreover,
as can be seen from examining the table, there was no statistical
relationship between the constraints used and the constraints stated,
even though the two tasks occurred one right after the other.
Characteristics that are easy to use are not always easy to state,
and characteristics that are easy to state are not always easy to
use. For instance, all beginning experts avoided using a setting, but
none mentioned this as a rule, whereas more beginning experts
mentioned consistent rhythm than produced one. Thus after very little
active exposure, the beginning experts could produce many aspects of
a new ballad, often following rules they did not state.
Pg
299
Quantitative
measure, descriptive and inferential statistics, and the logic and
use of the experimental method all functioned well, though there were
times when I felt I could not quantify or manipulate some subtlety
that nonetheless appeared real.
Pg
313
English-language
schooling was most important in a host of what Scribner and Cole
(1981) call “expository talk in contrived situations” (p.244),
which included explanations of sorting tasks, of grammatical rules,
of game instructions, and of logic. The effects of English-language
schooling on the ability to talk about tasks were often strong even
when performance on the tasks being talked about did not differ.
No comments:
Post a Comment