Folklore's Crisis

The field of folklore is experiencing topic drift, as the gap widens between the name of the field and what it now signifies. This article traces the history of a mutating disciplinary subject and its relationship to the discipline's formation, institutionalization, and name. Three themes are of special importance: folklore's temporality or the problem of a contemporary subject, orality and the question of technology, and folklore as a mode of cultural production. This explication of folklore as a keyword goes to the root of our history as a field, to the atavism that popular understanding preserves in the notion of folklore as error, and to the revolutionary energy that Walter Benjamin found in its embrace.