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Study Day: Popular Culture and Literature: Universal and Particular Features - Invitation

Features and signification of popular culture in literature indeed differ widely when we compare distinct literary genres, époques and cultural settings. It seems however worthwhile to ask where our cross-cultural approach may lead to: may it help to discern common traits and similarity, or can it be a catalyst helping to define particularities?

There are many aspects related to popular culture in literature – literary ones, such as vernacular language, particularities of production and reception of this literature, literary modes as satire and fantasy for example; social ones, such as the emergence of people belonging to lower or common strata of society, the appearance of objects, issues, voices and visions belonging to these people; and even political ones, such as challenged authority, popular participation in the shaping of ideas and images and the emergence of distinct identities and interests, for example.

It may therefore be helpful to identify a perspective which could be able to focus this large amount of aspects and approaches. It seems that the innovative character of an intrusion of the popular into the closed resort of official culture is a promising issue. Just as Michail Bachtin’s famous study on Gargantua and Pentagruel by Rabelais has exemplified, the appearance of the popular may occur by way of a shift of perspective, away from a sacrosanct elitist order of heavens and earth, of soul and body, of morale and silence, to a (re-)evented world of noise (laughter), of physical needs and pleasures. This kind of intrusion does not have to happen in a revolutionary manner, of course. A popular strand of representation and practices may accompany and in fact complement official believes in religion, for instance, and the popular, especially "das Volk", can fall victim of usurpation by mass ideologies as we know, or may become object of commercial strategies. However, popular literary genres, or the representation of the popular in literature, in fact often constitute a voice which programmatically stands against other and more official forms of utterance. In order to decipher their meaning we have to carefully evaluate historical circumstance as well as the context which these literary phenomena refer to. One link between the two study-days of the section «Text and Context» concerns texts called prophetic traditions (hadith).The so called apocryphal reports have a different status than the canonical corpus of hadith. Apocryphal prophetic reports are more spread in medieval Muslim society than the canonical texts. This is due to their transmission in the popular milieu within the circles of story telling and popular recitations of hadith.

Our study day combines a number of different approaches to this matter. Same of you accepted to give short talks about the topic from particular perspectives. We propose to proceed in the following manner:

1 - Presentation of the study day
2 - Dr. Ildiko Beller-Hann: Problematising Popular Culture
3 - Antje Leonora: Features of the popular in medieval Arabic narrative Coffee break
4 - Felix Otter: Is There Popular Literature in Sanskrit?
5 - Kai Porwoll: Popular Culture in Japan
6 - Conclusions

P.D. Hans Harder will be present in our study day and will chair the session.

At our homepage, http://www.gzaa.uni-halle.de, three papers are available treating main aspects of the issues which will be discussed. The first paper is a chapter from J. Berkey’s study, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East, (U.S.A, 2001).Berkey evokes the transmission of religious texts among various social institutions like story-tellers in medieval Islam. The process of transmission shows the travel of religious texts from the official sphere to the popular one. Starting from this paper, we can discuss what we commonly think about the origins of popular literature. More precisely, Berkey shows that the confines of the "popular" genre are defined by the transmitters of the texts and, in the same time, depend on the contexts of transmission. The second paper is from the third volume of Malcolm Lyons’s book: The Arabian epic: heroic and oral story-telling (Cambridge, 1995). We propose the extract of an English summary of an Arabic popular story. Our purpose is to give an example of the issue we are dealing with in our study day. Several elements appear in the story and can be the points of depart to our general discussion, for example the historical and fictitious figures and events, the representation of authority. The third text is from Carla Freccero’s Popular Culture: an Introduction (New York and London 1999). This text deals with popular culture in the modern world. The choice of the three documents is conducted by the necessity to find key-questions for our discussion. We invite you to complete our reflexion and to mention the points that appear important from your own perspectives. (The documents are available in the secretary’s office at Mühlweg 15 as well.) A short list of recommended lectures is proposed for a better understanding of problems related to "popular culture". The choice of references is directed by the diversity of our approaches. Some of the recommended lectures contain a glossary which can be useful for the reflexion on "popular culture", namely Carla Freccero’s Popular Culture: an Introduction (New York and London 1999.) pp. 149-171.

Recommended lectures

  • Ballas, S. and Snir, R. (eds.), Studies in Canonical and Popular Arabic Literature. Toronto, 1998.
  • Berkey, J. P., Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East, U.S.A, 2001.
  • Burke, P., Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. (revised reprint) London: Ashgate. [1978]. 2002.
  • Calmard, J., Popular Literature Under the Safavids In: Society and culture in the early modern Middle East: studies in Iran in the Safavid period. – Leiden, 2003, 315-339.
  • Freccero C., Popular Culture: an introduction. New York and London, 1999.
  • Gleave, R., Religion and Society in Qajar Iran, London, New York, 2005.
  • Herzog, T., Présentation de deux séances de hakawâtî et de deux manuscrits de la Sîrat Baybars recueillis en Syrie en 1994. Unpublished M.A. thesis. Aix-en-Provence.
  • Leder, S. Conventions of Fictional Narration in Learned Literature, in S. Leder (ed.) Story Telling in the Frame Work of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature. Wiesbaden, 1998. pp. 34-60.
  • Lyons, Malcolm C., The Arabian epic: heroic and oral story-telling. Cambridge, 1995.
  • Murray, S. O. and Roscoe, W., Islamic homosexualities: culture, history, and Literature, New York, 1997.
  • Schwarzbaum, H., Biblical and Extra-Biblical Legends in Islamic Folk-literature. Walldorf-Hessen, 1982.
  • Shoshan B., Popular culture in medieval Cairo. Cambridge, 1993.
  • Storey, J., Inventing Popular Culture. From Folklore to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. 2003.
  • Strinati, D., An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge. 2003.

Prof. S. Leder, P.D. H. Harder, A. Hilali.

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