Culture, Language & Education

Culture in Foreign Language Learning

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Oral Traditions of The United States

One of the first myths of the United States as an emerging nation was “Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient City of Gotham” by Washington Irving (1783-1859). These chronicles gave New York city its enduring nickname of Gotham. Follow with his success Irving publish in 1820 The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. This Sketch Book became one of the most famous and successful cause this contains two of the more popular American myths “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”. Both myths show in essence the spirit of the United States at the time joining the mystical and serious spectrums of the beginning of the 18th century.

Other author of a different merit that gave life to the American West myth was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) also known as the father of the American historical novel. One of his most important writings was The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821). Story about a hero Harvey Birch who is a Loyalist spy, but who secretly work to the service of General Washington. Then, he wrote The Pioneers (1823) the first book in a series of five Leatherstocking Tales. This tells the story of friendship between a colonialist and his friend from the Mohican tribe. After his success with this book, there were published through eighteen years the other four The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).

Similarly, the founding father of the Wester myth in literature Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), although being a Bostonian and almost never used Southern settings in his fiction and poetry. What gives Poe this position is his imagery present in most of their works. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is set in an anonymous landscape, or rather dreamscape, but it has all the elements that were later to characterize Southern Gothic: a great house and family falling into decay and ruin, a feverish, introspective hero half in love with death, a pale, ethereal heroine who seems and then is more dead than alive, rumors of incest and guilt – and, above all, the sense that the past haunts the present and that there is evil in the world and it is strong. Poe began his literary career with a volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). Published anonymously and at his own expense, it went unnoticed. But it clearly announced his poetic intentions: aims and ambitions that were later to be articulated in such seminal essays as “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850) and further put into practice in the later volumes, Poems by E A Poe (1831) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845).

Summarized from A Brief History of American Literature by Richard Gray,

October 20th, 2019

American Folklore and Oral Traditions

Parallelly, in the last three decades of the 18th century, the interest for native American folklore and oral traditions was led by Franz Boas (1858–1942). Maybe the first anthropological folklorist and the first academic in produce monumental collections of native American folklore such as Chinook Texts (1894) and Tsimshian Texts (1902). Later, in the 19th century many of his students continue his work some of them were Alfred Louis Kroeber, author of Indian Myths of South Central California (1907); Robert H. Lowie, who wrote Myths and Traditions of the Crow Indians (1918); and Paul Radin, author of Literary Aspects of North American Mythology (1915).

Though published in 1929, the classic collection Tales of the North American Indians by Stith Thompson is extremely useful for those interested in Native American oral literature between 1870 and 1920. Many of the tales in the anthology and many of the collections and studies cited in his thorough comparative notes and exhaustive bibliography fall into the period under review. Native American tales collected during this period include myths of the origin of the world and of humans; other etiological myths, including those explaining peculiarities of animals, birds, and plants; stories of tricksters and heroes; tales of journeys to other worlds, usually to the sky world; and stories of marriages between animals and humans.

Though much attention was paid to Native American folklore throughout the nineteenth century, little work was done on the folklore of other North American groups until after the Civil War, when some writers discovered African American folklore. The local color writer George Washington Cable, who published a couple of articles on Creole folksongs in Century magazine in 1886, was one of these writers. Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908), another regional writer, published an article on "Folklore of the Southern Negroes" in Lippincott's magazine in 1877. It was Harris's book Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880), however, that produced the most interest in African American folklore. In all, Harris published six collections of Uncle Remus tales, including his highly regarded Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905). Harris's animal tales inspired others to collect African American folklore in the United States.

The publication of William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison's Slave Songs of the United States (1867) stimulated an interested in another genre of African American folklore—folksongs—that has never abated. Many African American folksongs are functional. African work songs were fresh in the minds of newly arrived slaves, and on the plantations slaves created new work songs for picking cotton, plowing, husking corn, and other jobs in the field. When slavery was abolished, African American labor groups—often working on southern chain gangs, in prisons, and in construction camps—inherited the work song tradition. Their songs helped make the back-breaking work more bearable, and the rhythm of the songs kept the workers swinging their sledgehammers and picks more effectively than the whips of overseers. African Americans sang lyrical and narrative folksongs, too. In spirituals and blues, among the best of American lyrical folksongs, they sang their feelings. Though spirituals are religious and sung in groups and blues are secular and performed by individuals, both often express the same general feelings of bitterness and a desire to escape, sometimes employing the train as a symbol of getting away from unpleasant situations.

Taken from Atlas Obscura

From the southern fields, African Americans moved to cities after the Civil War, hoping for freedom but often finding a different kind of servitude in city slums, where crime frequently provided the only means of making a living; consequently, many African American ballads deal with crime and often with murder. While white Americans sang of Jesse James, Sam Bass, and Billy the Kid, black Americans sang of Stagolee, Bill Brady, and John Hardy, with some of their ballads being historical. The ballad "John Hardy," for example, is based on a real event. On 19 January 1894, John Hardy was executed at Welch, West Virginia, for killing a fellow miner in a crap-game dispute over twenty-five cents. It was not a bad man, though, who inspired one of the great African American ballads, but a hard-working, steel-driving man named John Henry, who died "with his hammer in his hand." The exact origin of "John Henry" will never be known, but it is thought that the John Henry legend got started around 1870 during the construction of the Big Bend Tunnel on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia. Whatever the origin, African Americans have largely been responsible for the preservation and diffusion of songs and stories about John Henry, and every state in the South claims him.

Between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, regional folklore was best preserved by regional realists or local color writers. Representative of these authors was Rowland E. Robinson (1833–1900), a Vermont farmer, sports enthusiast, and illustrator who did not begin to write until after middle age, when his sight began failing. He wrote most of his stories and nature essays after he was blind. Robinson had a lifelong interest in the oral traditions of his region. While hiking, hunting, fishing, trapping, and sketching in the vicinity of his Ferrisburgh home, he encountered a wide variety of Vermont folk traditions. In realistic stories such as Uncle Lisha's Shop: Life in a Corner of Yankeeland (1887), Sam Lovel's Camps: Uncle Lisha's Friends under Bark and Canvas (1889), Uncle Lisha's Outing (1897), A Hero of Ticonderoga (1898), and A Danvis Pioneer (1900), Robinson drew upon nearly every form of folklife, including speech, proverbs, riddles, rhymes, games, beliefs, cures, songs, tales, customs, arts, crafts, and architecture. What is more, utilizing the frame device, he presents this lore in authentically reconstructed social and physical contexts. Because his main purpose for writing stories, as he points out in his author's note in Danvis Folks (1900), was to preserve folklore and because he was interested in context as well as in texts, his writings offer a literary ethnography of nineteenth-century Vermont folklife.

In the Midwest, the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) grew up at a time when the nation was making a transition from agrarianism to industrialism. Throughout his life he always looked back with nostalgia on his boyhood days in an Indiana village, as he suggests in one of his sentimental poems, "The Old Times Were the Best." Riley, like other regional writers, was selective in his use of folklore and altered and adapted the material to suit his purpose. But like Robinson, Riley consciously preserved folklore and believed that the creative writer who draws upon folklife should be faithful in his or her presentation. In "Dialect in Literature" (1892), for example, he says "the true interpreter" of common life should permit "his rustic characters to think, talk, act and live, just as nature designed them. He does not make the pitiable error of either patronizing or making fun of them. He knows them and he loves them" (pp. 2682–2683). Although Riley is remembered for his poetry and not for his prose, his prose sketches, especially, indicate his thorough use of proverbs, superstitions, games, tales, songs, material culture, and customs. His work is also remarkable for its accurate transcription of regional speech. One value of his writings, as those of other regional authors of the period, is that they preserve a picture of folk practices from a time when no systematic field collections were made.

Many regional writers were inspired by tall tales—humorous narratives of lying and exaggeration—which were especially popular on the American frontier among hunters, fishermen, farmers, and river men, as the tales frequently deal with hunting, fishing, rough weather, fertile soil, big crops, and fabulous animals. Many tall tales deal with the legendary logger Paul Bunyan. As Daniel Hoffman shows in Paul Bunyan: Last of the Frontier Demigods (1952), this figure quickly passed from a folk hero of lumberjacks celebrated for his sexual prowess to a mass-culture hero found mainly in advertising and children's literature. Printed texts of Bunyan's exploits, however, fail to capture the tall tale's art, which, as Mark Twain suggests in "How to Tell a Story" (1897), lies in its manner of telling, not especially in its content. Twain (1835–1910) cites an old tale, "The Wounded Soldier," as told by James Whitcomb Riley in the character of an old farmer, to illustrate what he means. For his retelling of the tale, Riley, like Robinson, re-created a context of performance. This, according to Twain, is what makes Riley's treatment of the tale effective. In suggesting the importance of context and performance in oral storytelling, Twain predated the social scientists' interests in contextual folklore studies by at least forty years. Twain, himself, made good use of southwestern tall tales in his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), and also in Roughing It (1872). Some of his later works, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) (1885), are storehouses of all kinds of regional American folklore.

Taken from Encyclopedia.com,

October 22nd, 2019

American Folklore in the Present

Since the invention of writing humans started to put their oral traditions on stone, wood or paper. From the last three decades of the 20th century until nowadays the increasing use of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been giving to the American folklore the opportunity to become more known and shared worldwide. There is a resource created and updated by the American author S.E. Schlosser. This resource contains more than 2000 ghost stories, native American myths, tales, legends, fables, urban legends, folktales, ghost stories, rhymes, tongue twisters, etc. The same author has written The Spooky Series collecting the most popular ghost stories and scary stories from each state in United States. The same classification can be found in her American Folklore website.

American Folklore classify oral traditions not only by states but into categories and include resources for teachers and ESL learners. What is just perfect for teachers that like to explore in their lessons language and culture giving to students the opportunity to learn in deep not only language but cultural traditions as well.

Conclusions Unit 2

• The oral tradition of a country like United States has been shaped through a long process that start even before of the colonization of this country by European people.
• The multiple native American tribes had their own oral traditions as their language was unique. These oral traditions include myths, tales of journeys to other worlds and stories of love between animals and people.
• The African American folklore that was born from the slaves working in the United States fields tell to the readers a different version of slavery, not less cruel or unfair but one full of hope for the freedom that many slaves wanted and that finally was achieved.
• The immigrant movements that were lived in United States even before of being a nation also influence the oral tradition of what is now this huge nation.
• The folklore of United States as a new born nation inspire many authors to look for the regional folklife including the speech, proverbs, riddles, rhymes, games, beliefs, cures, songs, tales, customs, arts, crafts, and architecture. These aspects of the folklife represented each region and its way of living, these showed not only a national identity but a regional one.

References

Encyclopedia.com. (2019, October 21). Folklore and Oral Traditions. Retrieved from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/folklore-and-oral-traditions

Gray, R. (2011). A Brief History of American Literature. [PDF] Retrieved from Università di Cagliari: http://people.unica.it/fiorenzoiuliano/files/2016/04/A-Brief-History-of-American-Literature-Wiley-Blackwell-2011.pdf

Schlosser, S. (n.d.). United States Folklore. Retrieved from American Folklore: https://www.americanfolklore.net/ss.html

Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia UNAD. (2019, September 9). Activity Guide and Evaluation Rubrics - Task 3 - Intercultural Competence. [PDF] Retrieved from ACCeSIT Plataforma UNAD - LANGUAGE AND CULTURE - (551036A_615): https://campus24.unad.edu.co/ecedu29/mod/folder/view.php?id=1698