The Anthropology of Wisdom Literature
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Authors
Kaufmann, Wanda Ostrowska
Issue Date
1996
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Book, Whole
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Abstract
This book is an attempt to bridge the gap between literary criticism and anthropology in dealing with wisdom literature like the exemplum, a term used here to cover fables as well as apologues, parables, biblical and religious tales, anecdotes, moral tales, jokes, proverbs, and a multitude of other narrative genres. Kaufmann works here with the medieval, classical, and Indic traditions up to about 1400, hoping that three traditions will give her study objectivity and six hundred years will give the necessary distance. Kaufmann finds exempla presenting a uniform tripartite morphology: promythium, nucleus, and epimythium. Sometimes the promythium or the epimythium may be omitted, but never both (9). Deprived of both, the nucleus reverts to what it originally was, a bawdy tale, a joke, an animal tale, and so on (9). There is, I fear, a world of assumption behind that simple sample assertion. At this point, I wondered if I was reading a highly superficial work that would yield less insight than I hoped. I turned to a review of the book in The Journal of Folklore Research (Vol. 35, No. 2, May - August, 1998, Pages 172-74) by William Hansen from Indiana University. My hunch seems confirmed. Hansen writes that he cannot recommend the book. There are difficulties with Kaufmann's definition of her prey. First, it describes not a kind of story but a common way of using narratives of different kinds. It thus captures a species of rhetoric than a genre of story. Second, since either the promythium or the epimythium is optional, the alleged tripartite structure of the exemplum is so slippery that it does not offer the investigator much to hold on to (173). Hansen goes on to catalogue a plethora of errors. There may be individual spots of help here, like the good pointed summary of Nojgaard's sense of structure in fables, but I cannot trust this book.
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Publisher
Bergin & Garvey
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Identifier
8360 (Access ID)