Is plot a symptom? How folklorists study urban legends

Abstract

The article is dedicated to history and methods of urban legend studies. The author narrates the brief history of urban legend studies and covers upon some theoretical discussions concerning the terms “urban legend” and “contemporary legend”. Systematic research upon current folklore narratives began only in the 1940s, with contemporary legend becoming firmly established as an acclaimed research interest in the 1960s. Since the 1970s the issue of social reasons for emergence and popularity of certain plots becomes the key question of legend research. To answer it, folklorists follow the psychoanalytic “hermeneutics of suspicion”. They suggest that every legend contains a “hidden message” which needs to be perceived as a symptom of emotional status of the group. The author highlights two types of such psychoanalytic interpretation. Some researchers believe that legend’s function is articulation of nonconscious anxieties and fears of the group (the mechanism of folklore articulation, in terms of this paper). Other researchers suppose that a legend provides the group with an opportunity to compensate its moral discomfort (mechanism of folklore compensation). Nevertheless, the results of such interpretation were often arbitrary. This drew criticism in the 1990s, leaving the community in search of alternative explanations of why legends persist. But the question “Why?” is still unanswered. The theorists of ostension leave aside the issue of why a group produces and transmits a certain plot and focus upon how exactly the former is affected by the latter.