Some academic reading for y’all.
This was a paper I delivered at the annual International Society of Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) conference held in Lexington, KY in May 2013.
In “Legendry and the Rhetoric of Truth”, Elliott Oring (2008) proposes legend scholars need to address various rhetorical devices legend storytellers and audiences avail themselves to in performance. In many respects, Oring’s article is perhaps too essentialist and proscriptive to be useful to legend scholars themselves. What I am doing in this paper is to use Oring to develop a framework for a discussion of the legend-films, to look at the rhetorical devices film-storytellers use to convince us of the veracity of their narrative. The film text itself, rather than seeing it as a definitive artistic product, needs to be considered as a variant text; with sequels, remakes, and derivative films displaying both conservative trends within the filmmaking tradition it is self-consciously situated and dynamic variation…
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Film Studies @ Worcester 