In this course, we will focus on the scholarly or "informed" discourse
about the ballad, interrogating the place of the ballad through time,
analyzing its present status.  One of the early privileged "forms" or
concepts, the ballad has latterly fallen from grace in literary study and
has fallen on hard times in folkloristics as well--having been central to
both areas of formal study since the late nineteenth century.  How do we
explain the changing fashions of interest in what some continue to
maintain is a "classic genre"?

The concept/idea ballad may well have begun its life in nationalistic,
antiquarian, and romantic modes; and we will devote considerable attention
to some of the dichotomies that have been central to that discourse:
ancient/modern; oral/written; rural/urban.

Analytic discourse, of course, is only one way to look at the ballad:  we
might also examine the users, the sellers, the commodifiers, the
transformers.

Participants will be expected to do considerable assigned and
discretionary reading, to participate in class discussion, and to write a
considerable paper on some aspect of the ballad's history which may well
be shared with participants in the class.