Grand Theory in Folkloristics

Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and has carried out folklore research in Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the other islands of the Southwest Indian Ocean. He is the author of Verbal Arts in Madagascar and Stars and Keys (IUP 2007), a collection of folktale translations from the Indian Ocean islands.

Foreword
Michael Dylan Foster and Ray Cashman

Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century
Alan Dundes

Introduction
America's Antitheoretical Folkloristics
Lee Haring

The Sweep of Knowledge: The Politics of Grand and Local Theory in Folkloristics
Gary Alan Fine

What('s) Theory?
Margaret A. Mills

The Philology of the Vernacular
Richard Bauman

Humble Theory
Dorothy Noyes

Grand Theory, Nationalism, and American Folklore
John W. Roberts

There is No Grand Theory in Germany, and for Good Reason
James R. Dow

Responses
What Theory Is
Newton Garver

Weak Theory in an Unfinished World
Kathleen Stewart

"Or in Other Words": Recasting Grand Theory
Kirin Narayan

Disciplining Folkloristics
Charles L. Briggs

Afterwords
Reflections on Grand Theory, Graduate School, and Intellectual Ballast
Chad Edward Buterbaugh

Ten Years After
Lee Haring