This survey course will provide an overview of the history of the study of folk literature in America since 1888, the year that the American Folklore Society held its founding meeting at the University of Pennsylvania.  We will trace the evolving intellectual, political, and technological contexts for the study of folk literary forms from the classic canon (including ballads, folktales, proverbs, riddles, and legends) to the forms that continue to emerge, orally, graphically, and intertextually from  graffiti to blogs to grangers  (books that exceed themselves to become other books).  Readings, films, and field assignments will introduce students to a wide array of oral and written texts that engage what Kenneth Burke called “literature as equipment for living,” including place names, nicknames, code languages, mock instruments of writing, the practice of ecriture feminine, testimonies,  performance traditions of cowboys, preachers, stone carvers, wall street brokers, archivists,  and trial lawyers.  The cultural poetics of Bakhtin will illuminate our inquiry into how genres of speech play and verbal art, staged from multiple perspectives and social positions, continue to shape and reflect on the experience of becoming American.  Students will learn that, like objects in rear view mirrors, folklore is much closer than it appears. Work for the course will include readings, active participation in weekly discussions,  several short  reflective papers based on collecting exercises, and a term paper analyzing a presentation of American folk literature.