Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Portugal, Jose Alberto

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

This thesis seeks to make room for a new tradition of storytelling dubbed ‘neo-folk’ and a means through which readers can understand my own creative work and process. The first chapter examines ideas of folk cultures/societies and storytelling and its elements in order to make clear what is entailed by the idea of the neo-folk. This chapter asserts that neo-folk storytelling is a tradition that emerged from the displacement of the diaspora which, in turn, forces those subject to diaspora to create new forms of understanding and meaning production in order to reconcile the lives that they or their ancestors lived in their homelands with the experience of being in a vastly culturally disparate country. The next chapter then analyzes certain contemporary releases that are understood to be in the tradition of neo-folk storytelling and highlights the elements of the texts that designate them as such. The final section of the thesis is a reflection on my own creative work, how I see it as fitting into the tradition of neo-folk storytelling, and then my own work (three short stories) itself.

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