13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

PALLEIRO, Maria Ines

Travelling to AIDS World: hypertextual itineraries in Argentinean folk narrative

This paper contains some results of a postdoctoral research dealing with textualisation and hypertexts in Argentinean folk narrative whose first results I presented in the twelfth Congress.

In this postdoctoral research I worked with a corpus of twenty narratives collected during fieldwork in rural and urban areas of Argentina. In these narratives I have identified the same thematic, compositional and rhetorical pattern evident in the Meeting Death Tale (Aa-Th 332 Godfather Death and E 332.3.3.1 The Vanishing Hitchhiker). Considering this pattern as a narrative matrix, I have characterized the matrix as a blend of thematic, compositional and stylistic features common to texts in different contexts. According to my hypothesis, this matrix serves as a pre-text for different textual versions filed in the living memory of tellers of folk tales. From this standpoint, I propose an approach to folk narrative analysis that focuses on the study of the creative process or ‘genesis’ of the message and on hypertextual theory (Grésillon 1994:7). Following my hypothesis, the creative process of the folktale involves the textual transformation of a pre-textual matrix. On the other hand, I regard hypertexts as free links of textual blocks that offer the possibility of deconstructing sequential discourses into alternative itineraries (Nelson 1992:2). These alternative itineraries, filed in the virtual memory of the computer, reproduce the filing process of narrative matrices in the living memory of folk narrators.

In this paper, I will focus my attention on a text containing three versions of this matrix. This text will illustrate the main alternative itineraries of the matrix in the whole corpus: Death in the Ballroom, Hitchhiking on the Road and Welcome to AIDS World. By means of an intertextual comparison with two European versions, I will analyse how AIDS and road-travelling topics act as metaphors of globalisation associated with dangerous threats to local ways of life and review the contextual differences of the stories.

In short, the aim of this paper is to point out the textual transformations of a flexible pre-textual matrix whose bifurcation is the result of a genetic process shown in a hypertextual deconstruction.

References:
Grésillon, A. 1994, Eléments de critique génétique. Lire les manuscrits modernes, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
Nelson, Th. 1992, Literary machines 90.1. Il progetto Xanadu, Franco Muzzio Editore, Padova.