Meets with L715. The leading question for this seminar might well be:
what has happened to the ballad?  A popular form, copiously edited
and annotated in the five volume work of Francis James Child (l882-
l898), this course bears the title of that work. While Child himself
was Harvard’s first professor of English and The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads was his greatest scholarly achievement, Child’s name
and fame have more recently been appropriated in the
intradisciplinary tension/s between composition and literature, he
having been, early in his career, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric.
Once a staple of the medieval section of literary anthologies (and
thought to have been created by minstrels/bards), the ballad now
hovers awkwardly and incompletely on the margins of the eighteenth
century.  Why?  What about the so-called ballad has created this
situation, this canonical mis-placement? Once the most frequently
taught “genre” of vernacular literature, such courses now languish.
Can we explain why?  Once a form studied in a comparative context,
with roots in the German philological tradition, such studies too
have fallen out of fashion.
In interrogating the discursive formations surrounding the ballad
question, can we uncover explanations for the current situation?
Offer new directions?  Reframe the question/s?  Resituate these
materials?
Whatever ballads are, they are a real and varied phenomena,
not “imagined.”  Rather accounts of their genesis, genealogy,
pedigree, history have been imagined, hypothesized, fabricated. There
are perhaps two entrees into the topic--the texts (and tunes)
themselves, their corporality and historicity, their embeddedness in
a time and place as well as the critical discussion of those who have
made the ballad their object of study: to what extent, we might ask,
have their discourses reflected more on their own locations in time
and space, their own ideological concerns than on the textual,
ethnographic, historical evidence?  Has the ballad’s opacity made it
a kind of cultural transparency?
Offspring of discourse about the beginnings of national literatures
and canons, the ballad seems
weirdly orphaned.  What home/s might it have?  Should it have?  If
not national, what about popular? vernacular? pastiche? postmodern
avant la lettre?
Many and varied texts, much commentary, few conclusions: our task
will be to insert ourselves as fully as possible into the topic and
to begin answering, however tentatively or definitively, the
questions raised above.
The seminar will meet once weekly and will alternate
analysis/discussion of ballads themselves with the critical
discourses that have surrounded them over the years.  Each
participant will, of course, prepare weekly for considered
participation and in the last weeks of the semester present a
position paper (orally and in writing) on some aspect of the ballad’s
ideal/potential location/position in various disciplinary contexts.
Readings will undoubtedly include texts taken from Child’s work as
well as other compedia, essays and introductions from the eighteenth
century to the present among which are likely to be: Joseph Addison,
Spectator pieces; Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry; Scott,
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; Motherwell, Minstrelsy: Ancient
and Modern; Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk; Stewart, Crimes of
Writing; Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition; Anderson,
Imagined Communities, etc.