Literary Education and Democracy Lionel Gi an MLN, Vol. 86, No. 6, Comparative Literature. (Dec., 1971), pp. 761-789. Stable URL htp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=( 126-79 10% 281971 12%2986%3A6%3C761%3ALEAD% 31 (0%3B2-G MLN is currently published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hutp:/wwwjstor.org/joumals/jhup.himl. ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Thu Jul 6 07:17:42 2006761 (('TERARY EDUCATION AND DEMOC- RACY &4 BY LIONEL GOSSMAN 4 In a dlassical article, published in Holland in 1929, Pyotr Bogatyrev and Roman Jakobson undertook an important reconsideration of the relation between written and oral literature. Rejecting both the Romantic reverence for folklore as communal creation and the opposing view that all folk literature is " gesunkenes Kulturgut,”* they found in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure a model on which a more adequate theory of folklore creation and folklore tradition might be built. Against the positivist and neo-grammarian view that only individual speech acts are real, while everything else is philosophi- cal abstraction, a view that is easily compatible with the theory of “ gesunkenes Kulturgut" in folkloristics, they set Saussure's view of Ianguage as a unity of “langue” and “ parole,” of the system of language and of individual realizations of it, the former being as “real” as—because the condition ofthe latter. When specific, Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens”" Donum Nataticium Sehsijnen, Nijmegen and Unrecht, 129, pp. 900-18. The ideas set forth In this paper were to some extent adumbrated by Cecil Sharp (English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, 1907, and the introduction to English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians, 1917), and. they have been confirmed, on the whole, bby subsequent scholarship: cf notably Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge, Mase, 1960 and Lords contsibution to Four Symposia on Folklore, fd, Stith ‘Thompson, Bloomington, 1953, pp. 305-15. Bertrand Bronson. hat ‘ritiaed Sharp notion of tradition as a debate between Individual creativity fnd the censoring control of the group on account of its obvious evolutionist bias, Tradition, he claims, is not opposed to but buile into the creation of individuals, so that individual creation does not seriously transgress the frame: work prescribed by tradition ("The Morphology of the Ballad Tunes,” Journal of American Folklore, 1954, 67: 1-14). ‘This refinement of Sharp's postion seems Compatible with the views’ of Jakobson and Bogatyrev Summed up inthe statenient of Hoffmann-Krayer, "Das Volk produziert nicht, ex reprodusicrt” (cf, Hans Naumann, Primitive Gemeinschaftkultur, Jena, 1921, p. 5). A version of this view is at least as old as Scott ("Intro Guctory Remarks on Popular Poctry"” in the 1880 edition of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. T. F. Henderson, Edinburgh, 1902, 128-19). 1¢ is stil i! among non-specialists of literature’ (Charles Lalo, L'4rt et la 1921, pp. 142-45, puts it forward 35 a fact). Alan Dundes ‘made ‘what he calls the “devolutionary premise In folklore theory” the ject of 4 gencral survey of the ideologicy underlying folklore studies. in Journal of the Folklore Institute, 1969, 6: 5-19.762 MLN individual exploitations of the speech code are sanctioned by the ‘community, they become part of the general linguistic resources of the community, and thus, in a way, part of “langue.” Language, in short, is a constant interchange, of varying intensity, between the speech acts of individuals and the linguistic system, which alone makes these acts possible and through which alone they have any chance of survival, In folklore, according to Jakobson and Bogatyrev, a similar relation obtains between individual perform. ances of folk works and the works themselves. Individual performers of folklore works may well give an indi- vidual rendering of their models? Only those variations which the community finds acceptable, however, Bogatyrev and Jakobson claimed, are integrated into the work and taken up by subsequent poet-performers. In contrast, the written work, even though it meets with indifference or misunderstanding on its first appearance, survives as a potentiality which may be, and, as some celebrated cases in literary history testify, often is realized at a later date by subsequent generations of readers. ‘Bogatyrev and Jakobson did not deny that individuals contribute to folklore works, but they questioned our tendency to consider these in the same way as products of written literature. To us, they argued, a work is born at the moment its author writes it down on paper; correspondingly, the moment at which the oral work is objectified— performed ” in other words-is taken by us to mark its birth, whereas in reality it becomes part of folklore only by being admitted into the tradition by the community. At the birth of folklore, in short, there is not an anonymous author, but a collective one. Though this position seems close to that of the ‘Romantics, it differs from it in that the Romantics merely applied * One should distinguish between freeform and fixed-orm types of folklore— tales for instance, om the one hand, and proverbs, on the other. Only the first category. i# aubject to modification by Individual Tn’ addition, Bogatyrey distinguishes between "activecolleeti * pusive-colleatve ” ‘works of oral poetry. ‘The former category includes works which can be. per formed by all members of the community (cradlesongs, ceremonial songs, etc), the later includes these works which are performed by spedalized—often quite rare—members of the community, though the whole community considers them its spiritual heritage. ‘The evolution of the wadition is different ‘cases, according to Bogatyrev, and should be studied separate Rolle von Singer, Zuhdrerschaft und Buch bel der Oberlieferung und. Ver Anderung eplscher Lieder,” In Sowjetsche Volhsied- und Volksmusikforschng: fusgewdhite Studien, ed. E. Stockman, t, al, Berlin, 1962, pp. 187-201