Transformation of Stories/Use-Value and Genre

One way of looking at the evolution of anonymous stories is to trace their transformations. Here are the four major kinds of transformation I will be looking at:

Transformation of stories when they travel from:

1.one genre to another in the same period and the same culture (e.g. history to literature);

2. one culture and language to another (e.g. Latin to vernacular, Old French to Middle English, Sanskrit to Arabic, Arabic to English);

3. one period to another (e.g. pre-literacy and literacy, pre-modern and modern, before and after copyright law);

4. one medium to another (e.g. oral to written,  literature to film.)

What can narrative transformation tell us about the function of ‘tradition’ in the ways texts, literary or otherwise are shaped?

Why are the seemingly same stories re-told in a variety of ways?

Genres are unstable because they are produced intertextually; they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places where genres "collide" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology and the use-value of language. 

Here are some of my questions using ideas from Genre Studies:

Which cultures and periods have been the most "genre-sensitive" or "genre demanding?"

Might use-value be a better way of defining genres than critical or popular labels? (However, to find and in particular to express the exact use-value of genres is not always such an easy matter.)

In what ways may the changes be attributed to genre ideologies, and what are the other causal factors?

Can genre ideologies explain the formations of literary or other canons and traditions?

What can these genre ideologies tell us about the culture, genre or medium that produced the story?

Mimesis in the Public Domain

Literary works with multiple oral and textual sources such as such as the Bible, the ancient epics of Greece and India, The 1001 Nights, or The Lancelot/Grail Cycle, create dense and fluid textual networks that survive and grow over time. Most of these works were either orally or collectively composed and remained multiform even after they became texts. For the past decade or so I have been working toward an informed grasp of the similarities and differences between these Anonymous Masterpieces and their widespread influence. Why have they branched out and flourished for so long? Is it because of innate characteristics that transcend cultural barriers and remote origins? The study will trace the history of the concept of authorship as it evolves from ascribing voice and identity to ownership of intellectual property. If I ever finish the resulting project, the book will be a response to Auerbach’s Mimesis  using heuristics adapted from studies of cultural evolution. I will have a section on what are in the West lesser known epics and collections of stories from Native American, African, Indo-European, Middle-Eastern and Asian languages. So, it will be a sweeping but detailed, simplified but learned, and scholarly but entertaining, big old-fashioned book. The only polemics are arguments for the importance of the Public Domain and for reading the biggest stuff first.