The Genre of Trolls - Doria

Laura Stark-Arola’s account of the construction of the genre context and
the inter-genre context is also relevant to this discussion. Both are devised
by indicating the similarity of semantic structures; concerning the former, a
multitude of texts of the same type, be they ritual descriptions, incantations
or narratives, are assembled in order to show that they form a class of texts
because of their resemblance to each other in terms of form, function and/
or message. As for the latter, the similarities are observed across classes,
types and genres (Stark-Arola 1998: 69–70). An inter-genre macro-text is
created by the existence of common poetic elements and themes in texts
belonging to different genres (cf. Tarkka 1994: 292, 294). North Karelian
lempi-bathing incantations, for example, share many elements with wedding
songs and lyric songs about marriage, and the inter-genre macro-text
thus generated addresses the themes of pairing and marriage. These intergenre
macro-texts and the poetic elements constituting them are, in essence,
a system of referentiality, invoking a larger, but implicit world of images
and symbols (Stark-Arola 1998: 188). At this point, intertextuality has
indeed been transformed into intergenericity.
Anna-Leena Siikala briefly utilized Briggs and Bauman’s concept of intertextual
gaps in an article on emotions and their expression in the culture
of the province of Savo in Finland (Siikala 1998). She noted that lyric singers
from Savo tended to break the rules of tragic songs by inserting elements
of humour into the text, thus producing a maximization of the intertextual
gap always present in the linking of a text to a generic model, through
the abrupt change in style (Siikala 1998: 170). She returned to the topic in
two studies of the Southern Cook Island korero, history, which she considered
to be an extensive intertextual network (Siikala 2000a, 2000b); the
korero is truly a secondary genre as Bakhtin envisioned it, functioning both
as a kind of metadiscourse in which the content is mediated using varied
strategies, and as a metagenre comprised of the same contentual matter and
the same functional field though represented and performed in diverse
forms. Hence the korero furnishes generic models for the concrete instantiations
of history, ranging from the tua taito (‘old narratives’), the poetic pees,
the mastery of which characterizes the specialist, called the tumu korero, genealogies,
and the ura performances incorporating song and dance (Siikala
2000b: 221; 2000a: 353). The proper performance of the korero is invested
with great authority and has social and political implications because of the
link to leadership and land rights through genealogical knowledge. The
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Introduction