The Genre of Trolls - Doria

conception of the troll. 1 The objects of analysis are two texts from the repertoire
of a single narrator, the carpenter Johan Alén hailing from the village
of Rejpelt in the parish of Vörå. The definition of genre utilized here
is that presented by Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman in their article
“Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power” (1992). Genres are viewed as
“generalized or abstracted models of discourse production and reception”
mediated through the relationship with prior discourse (Briggs & Bauman
1992: 147). Through genre, narrators may shape speech into ordered, unified
and bounded texts with strong social and historical associations,
though the invocation of genre also renders texts fragmented, heterogeneous
and open-ended because of the dependence on other discursive formations
and contextual factors for the interpretation, production and reception
of discourse (Briggs & Bauman 1992: 147–149). Briggs and Bauman
emphasize the role of the narrator in shaping and reconfiguring genres, and
they introduce the notion of intertextual gaps, which can be minimized or
maximized, to describe the process of connecting an utterance to a generic
model. Minimization of the distance between texts and genres makes the
discourse maximally interpretable through reference to generic precedents,
while maximization is associated with various motives for distancing oneself
from textual precedents (Briggs & Bauman 1992: 149). In contrast to
many earlier contributions to the folkloristic debate on genre, 2 Briggs and
Bauman focus on how genres actually work, not on how they should be defined
or on their source-critical value, whether they are useful or deplorable
concepts, whether emic or etic categories should be used, or whether generic
designations ought to be employed in the classification of folklore in
tradition archives. This is of particular import in an analysis of the intertextual
constitution of genre.
The question of genre is also actualized in relation to parody, of which
the two texts are specimens. Parodies are sometimes cited as prime examples
of intertextuality (Dentith 2000: 5–6) due to their overt connection to
another, or several other, texts or to a genre. My hypothesis is that these
1 Here I am using the adjective generic to refer to genre, as Charles Briggs and Richard
Bauman have done.
2 See e.g. Abrahams 1976a; Abrahams 1976b; Honko 1968; Honko 1971; Honko 1976;
Honko 1981; Honko 1989; Ben-Amos 1976a; Ben-Amos 1976b; Ben-Amos 1992; Klintberg
1981; Alver 1967; Dégh 1976; Dégh & Vázsonyi 1976; Lüthi 1976; von Sydow 1971a; von
Sydow 1971b; von Sydow 1971c.
4
Introduction