Folklore

University of California, Berkeley

This is an archived copy of the 2014-15 guide. To access the most recent version of the guide, please visit http://guide.berkeley.edu/.

Overview

The Folklore Program at the University of California, Berkeley trains intellectual leaders in folkloristics for the twenty-first century. The program seek to provide a deep, critical, and theoretically-informed reading of folklore scholarship from the seventeenth century through the present. Students are urged to develop a particular field of expertise in folkloristics. At the same time, graduate students are advised to develop a strong grounding in another discipline or multidisciplinary perspective such as race and ethnic studies, performance studies, science studies, rhetoric, narrative theory, ethnomusicology, materiality, womens and queer theory, or others in order to bring new perspectives into their work in folkloristics.

The program is truly international in scope, seeking to challenge the Eurocentric roots of folkloristics by bringing in critiques and alternatives from outside the Euro-American orbit, particularly through study with leading folklorists from around the world who come to Berkeley each year as visiting faculty members.

Undergraduate Program

There is no undergraduate program in Folklore.

Graduate Programs

Folklore : MA

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Courses

Folklore

FOLKLOR C261 Theories of Narrative 4 Units

This course examines a broad range of theories that elucidate the formal, structural, and contextual properties of narratives in relation to gestures, the body, and emotion; imagination and fantasy; memory and the senses; space and time. It focuses on narratives at work, on the move, in action as they emerge from the matrix of the everyday preeminently, storytelling in conversation--as key to folk genres--the folktale, the legend, the epic, the myth.

FOLKLOR C262A Theories of Traditionality and Modernity 4 Units

This seminar explores the emergence of notions of tradition and modernity and their reproduction in Eurocentric epistemologies and political formations. It uses work by such authors as Anderson, Butler, Chakrabarty, Clifford, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, Mignolo, Pateman, and Poovey to critically reread foundational works published between the 17th century and the present--along with philosophical texts with which they are in dialogue--in terms of how they are imbricated within and help produce traditionalities and modernities.

FOLKLOR C262B Theories of Traditionality and Modernity 4 Units

This seminar explores the emergence of notions of tradition and modernity and their reproduction in Eurocentric epistemologies and political formations. It uses work by such authors as Anderson, Butler, Chakrabarty, Clifford, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, Mignolo, Pateman, and Poovey to critically reread foundational works published between the 17th century and the present--along with philosophical texts with which they are in dialogue--in terms of how they are imbricated within and help produce traditionalities and modernities.

FOLKLOR 298 Readings in Folklore 3 - 6 Units

FOLKLOR 299 Directed Research 3 - 6 Units

Contact Information

Folklore Program

232 Kroeber Hall

Phone: 510-642-3406

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Program Chair

Charles Briggs, PhD (Department of Anthropology)

cbriggs@berkeley.edu

Graduate Student Affairs Officer

Ned Garrett

232 Kroeber Hall

Phone: 510-642-3406

ned@berkeley.edu

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