O significado da História

Oral narratives fall into two broad classifications in China. The first is "folk literature," and the second is urban-based narratives performed by professional or avocational performers. The field of study focusing on oral literature (koutou wenxue) is concerned with traditional genres that tend to be lumped under rather general though not necessarily descriptive headings such as folktale, myth, legend, children's stories, animal tales, narrative poems, epics, and so forth. These categories, introduced into China from the West (to some extent via Japan) by the early twentieth century and modified to suit Chinese needs by scholars such as the late Zhong Jingwen, are still the basis of the text-based approach to oral literature followed by most scholars and cultural workers in China today. It is assumed that most of these forms of narrative (as well as folksongs) exist and are collected among rural people. In recent decades, massive folklore collecting projects have resulted in the anthologizing of a huge number of texts (rather highly censored in the early decades after 1949) in a wide variety of venues, including newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and book series. At times some were used to promote political agendas and many texts have found their way into a variety of popular media. Moreover, a large number of works have been published as "innercirculating" documents for scholars only since 1949. In recent years, as strictures have relaxed, most scholars prefer the public forums. Though the bulk of published materials are "text-based" (sometimes with little or no description of the performance process and context), in recent years a small number of younger, well-positioned Chinese scholars have turned a critical eye to developments in folklore studies in Europe and the United States and have begun experimenting with a bundle of approaches that, if considered from a distance, might be called the "oral pragmatics" school of Western folklore/folk narrative studies. The body of theory constituting this syncretizing approach (which seems pragmatic both in the sense of descriptive methodology and ethnopoetic politics) wields a theoretical tool-kit that includes Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory, a

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O significado da História

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The Boundaries and Constituencies of History

The Boundaries and Constituencies of History

Oral Narrative Studies in China

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