Rozpočítávadlo a zaklínadlo jako bachtinovské miniatury: apofaze, kreativní performativ a kenotaph magie v dětském folkloru
Counting-Out Rhymes and Charms as Bakhtinian Miniatures: Apophasis, Creative Performatives, and the Kenotaph of Magic in Children’s Folklore

Summary/Abstract: This study proposes reading two miniature forms of children’s folklore—the counting-out rhyme, a procedural genre of selection by lot, and the charm or incantation, a creative genre of fiat speech—as Bakhtinian miniatures, against their conventional relegation to the margins of folkloristic and linguistic interest. In compressed form, these small genres reflect key layers of Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptual grammar: apophatic procedure, the choral principle of sobornost, the kenotic movement of lowering, the eucharistic cycle of grain and humus, the open body, and the anamnesis of great time. Drawing on Czech folkloristics [WENIG 1935; ERBEN 1864; SIROVÁTKA 1982], English material [OPIE, OPIE 1959, 1985], and Russian scholarship [VINOGRADOV 1924, 1930], the study shows that both forms are living instances of what Bakhtin described theoretically in Rabelais and His World and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. It proposes the hermeneutic figure of the counting-out rhyme and the incantation as “kenotaphs” of archaic magic.

• Details
• Contents