Overview

Emerging Folklorists showcases outstanding work done by Missouri college students from 2010-19. These projects came primarily from folklore courses and capstones; most were presented at Missouri Folklore Society conferences. These papers represent a range of topics and approaches, from rigorously quantitative analyses to humanistic studies that ask to be validated by the reader's recognition of sound insight and empathetic understanding. They include oral history, family history, structural linguistics, archival study and a great deal of fieldwork. Though the disciplines here range widely, we had in mind something comparable to The Apprentice Historian, a model which the discipline of history provides to showcase exceptional learners. So Emerging Folklorists opens with a pre-med student contextualizing lore from her Girl Scout camp. Next, an avid video gamer analyzes gamer language. The volume's seventeen essays include a linguistics student tackling the linguistic structures of Yo Momma jokes, and a student of A.I. using computer analysis to explore patterns of sounds and grammar in Knock Knock jokes. Another student uses brain- imaging data to analyze the way subjects processed the humor of memes. An extraordinarily gifted gay student collects, categorizes, and offers insight into coming out stories. Another researcher focuses on 1990s updates of the Bluebeard motif. A rural student (now a PhD in Literature) explores her county's history, including oral accounts of farms and a factory, a Civil War skirmish, the cultural artifacts of enslaved people. Another from southern Missouri collects stories from people of her grandparents' generation about racial confrontations in her home town. Many of the essays include appendices--data collected, transcriptions of interviews, etc., valuable in their own right. Some of these inquiries are in spots naive in the sense art historians use the term--work that shows the marks of the newcomer, or that may not have the range of historical reference of more senior practitioners, but work which rides on a freshness and a freedom from the preconceptions which can mark professionals. These researchers are people still learning how to imagine their audience - they do not always know what needs to be explained and what does not. But in folklore they have found one of the places where an undergraduate can make genuine contributions to knowledge.

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9781952232596

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Adam Davis, Professor of English at Truman State University, has twice served as president of the Missouri Folklore Society and is the organization's executive secretary and webmaster. He is also managing editor of GREEN HILLS LITERARY LANTERN.

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