Week 2 Storybook Topics

1) Possible Topic: Ballads! I love ballads; I know a lot of them, and sing them to annoy my brothers (because a lot of the time they're kind of depressing and sung in a minor key), but I'm always up for learning more. What I love most about them is the way they have certain narrative conventions that interconnect within the different traditions--for example, there are "genres" of Irish ballads that all use specific linguistic and thematic devices to tell their stories. I would have to pick whether I was going to do English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh ballads, I suppose, but I love the way that the songs always tend to be just ambiguous enough to leave room for lots of artistic license and/or reinterpretation while still clearly referencing a specific song or genre. Obviously I've already done a lot of research already on this topic, so I know about the Child Ballads, but I haven't by any means read or heard all of them so picking a few of the lesser-known ones for my storybook would be really interesting, I think.

(Photo of Knud Rasmussen, via Wikimedia Commons)

2) Possible Topic: Inuit myths. It might be interesting aesthetically to do a storybook this way, because of the ways in which Inuit myths were told--or it might even be a cool idea to move them into contemporary times! I've been taking a class this semester called Visual Anthropology, and we've been reading about and watching indigenously-made clips of Inuit myths--and I've been telling myself this entire time that I should learn more about them! From the UnTextbook, there's the Eskimo Folk Tales unit (it should be noted that the author of this book, Knud Rasmussen, has actually been mentioned quite a bit in my VisAnth class), but there's also this website, which may not include source material but may give me a springboard into some other myths that are interesting...

3) Possible Topic: Anansi Spider Tales. I love trickster myths, and I've actually (as weird as it sounds) always wanted to write a story about a spider--and this would give me the chance to write several! I don't really know anything about West African myths, too, so this would be a cool opportunity to do some research on them--I've had to read a couple of ethnographies set in West Africa for my anthropology classes, too, so it might be interesting to use those to help develop my setting. And as always, there's also the link to the UnTextbook....

4) Possible Topic: The Panchatantra. It sounds so interesting to be able to write in a nested form; I'd really like to try it out. Stories about storytellers often get really interesting--as my Visual Anthropology teacher would say about filming filmmakers, things get "really cool and weird and stuff," so this is definitely a possibility. Also, having poked through Wikipedia a bit, it looks like this work was the inspiration for Kalilah wa Dimnah, which is a book of Arabic folk tales that I read in actual Arabic for a book club, so now I'm really excited to learn more!