Folklore Commons^™

A Damn Short Prayer, Beth Jane Toren

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This poster presents a transcript poem created with murder tales in oral history recordings. Leveraging the creative arts of storytelling, transcript poetry and visual orality, the poster brings light and music to Appalachian storyteller voices in tales of shady murders.

The handout presents the poem with visual orality methods juxtaposed beside Standard English orthographic transcription, enabling a visual comparison, a link a video with graphic text and the original voice recordings, and brief readings about concepts and methods.

Ecojustice, Religious Folklife And A Sound Ecology, Jeff Todd Titon

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Folk, traditional, and indigenous ecological knowledges have a significant role to play in ecojustice. A case study in the traditional ecological knowledge among one of the religious communities with whom I have spent several decades illustrates how they embody the main principle and three fields of an ecological rationality: the community of inter-related beings; the ways the beings participate in that community or place; and the relations of nature and the nonhuman world to humans and human nature. Ecological rationality stands in contrast to economic rationality, a branch of instrumental reason exemplified by what economists call rational choice theory. An …

The Bird, The Oak, And The Stories That Build Us, Alicyn Newman

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This is a project combining creative writing and oral history research surrounding the life of my late grandfather, Kenneth Wesley Newman. In its pages, I delve into memory, history, and storytelling, seeking to identify which stories have held meaning for my family over time, and why. I have written my way chronologically through my grandfather’s life and interwoven his narrative with what I know now, what I remember, and the stories we continue to tell as a family. The interdisciplinary nature of this project led to a combination of creating writing and research, which included reading war-era letters, watching home …

Ua37/44 Faculty Personal Papers Gordon Wilson, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Personal papers of Gordon Wilson.

Dark Magic Part 1, Rachel Quaid

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Dark Magic is a novel that mixes old folklore with fantasy and a splash of modern day. This first part of the novel readies the readers to enter the world of the old Irish Aos Sì. Ophelia is a witch, living in the land of the fae. She signs up to help with a research study to better her chances at succeeding as a healer. Rhea is a member of the Tuatha de Danann, the fae folk who rule the land from their courts of old. She is sent by her caretaker to observe this study. Everyone knows witches and …

Rendering 20th Century Peruvian Folklore For A 21st Century Reader: Es>En Translation And Analysis Of Peruvian Folktales And Mythology, Angela Walsh

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In the 1940s José María Arguedas and Francisco Izquierdo Ríos collected oral tradition stories from three separate geographical areas of Peru. The publication of these legends, myths and Peruvian tales (Mitos, leyendas y cuentos peruanos 1947) and its function as an historical record of cultural and national identity led Arguedas to national acclaim. However, these mythological and folk tales, legends and myths have had little attention outside of Peru and few tales have been translated into English. The thesis begins with an introduction to the challenges of translating folklore and cultural artifacts, the nature and function of tales likes these …

The Mothman And Other Strange Tales: Shaping Queer Appalachia Through Folkloric Discourse In Online Social Media Communities, Brenton Watts

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Little work has been conducted on the intersections of queer and Appalachian identities, in part because these two identities are viewed as incompatible (Mann 2016). This study uses a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to examine the Instagram posts of the Queer Appalachia Project, which represent a substantial body of discourse created by and for queer Appalachians. Of specific interest to this analysis are those posts which employ folkloric figures, such as West Virginia’s Mothman, to do identity work that is queer, Appalachian, and queer-Appalachian. Often, this act is accomplished through juxtaposition with Appalachian imagery and the reclamation of homophobic …