Newspaper legend and personal experience narrative as symptom of crisis of prosaic folkloristics? Note about history of folkloristical concepts
Abstract
The text investigates critical history of two important genological concepts which appeared in Central European (mostly Czech, German and Polish) folkloristics in the 20th century: Zeitungssage (newspaper legend) and personal experience narrative (memorate). Both of these concepts appeared as somewhat desperate attempt of the textocentric discipline to deal with growing number of documented oral narratives which could not fit into "standard" genres of verbal folklore such as folktale or legend.
The author argues that both of these attempts partly led to a dead end - and, because of that, during the early 2000s, had been largely abandoned by many researchers. Studies of these texts then achieved paradigm shift influenced by international folkloristics - some of the studied material started to be classified as contemporary legend and rumour, while the other part followed disciplinary path of oral history.
Nevertheless, both of these concepts present fascinating chapter in history of prosaic folkloristics in particular and memory studies in general.