Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
These Stories Sustain Me: Traditional Narratives and the Affirmation of Folk Metaphysics
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Growing up in South East Appalachia Ohio, I heard stories about Daniel Boone from my father, Logan the Orator from my high school wrestling coach/history teacher, and listened to my Grandma sing “The Ballad of John Henry.” These “folktales,” shared by my elders, taught me the foundational meaning of place, self, and virtue—what Charles Upton calls “folk metaphysics.” Later, in college, I was confronted with mass media counter narratives depicting my reality as, paradoxically, both clownish and dangerous, causing me to question my identity in a world beyond the home place. Drawing on both personal experience and my ten years working with traditional Navajo Story Tellers, I explore the role folklore and mass media counter narratives have in constructing Appalachian identity. Specifically, I draw a distinction between folklore’s concern with developing and maintain heritage and culture by affirming traditional values of family and place and mass media’s focus on re-configuring negative stereotypes as cultural resistance. These counter narratives create a negative view of Appalachian culture leading to a rejection of best selves, promising liberation from shame and guilt in a system of anonymous, social marginalization. Part textual and social criticism and part self-ethnography, this paper utilizes social-epistemic rhetorical analysis and Erich Fromme’s psychological perspective on disobedience and submission to discuss the role folktales and folktellers have in reclaiming the vitality of our stories to validate the diversity of cultural and personal “identity work” from mass media’s standardization of narratives produced for consumption by caricatured demographics.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Born in Ross County, Ohio, Edward Karshner teaches Rhetoric and Philosophy at Robert Morris University.
These Stories Sustain Me: Traditional Narratives and the Affirmation of Folk Metaphysics
Growing up in South East Appalachia Ohio, I heard stories about Daniel Boone from my father, Logan the Orator from my high school wrestling coach/history teacher, and listened to my Grandma sing “The Ballad of John Henry.” These “folktales,” shared by my elders, taught me the foundational meaning of place, self, and virtue—what Charles Upton calls “folk metaphysics.” Later, in college, I was confronted with mass media counter narratives depicting my reality as, paradoxically, both clownish and dangerous, causing me to question my identity in a world beyond the home place. Drawing on both personal experience and my ten years working with traditional Navajo Story Tellers, I explore the role folklore and mass media counter narratives have in constructing Appalachian identity. Specifically, I draw a distinction between folklore’s concern with developing and maintain heritage and culture by affirming traditional values of family and place and mass media’s focus on re-configuring negative stereotypes as cultural resistance. These counter narratives create a negative view of Appalachian culture leading to a rejection of best selves, promising liberation from shame and guilt in a system of anonymous, social marginalization. Part textual and social criticism and part self-ethnography, this paper utilizes social-epistemic rhetorical analysis and Erich Fromme’s psychological perspective on disobedience and submission to discuss the role folktales and folktellers have in reclaiming the vitality of our stories to validate the diversity of cultural and personal “identity work” from mass media’s standardization of narratives produced for consumption by caricatured demographics.
