Animal Categories in Chicano Children's Spooky Stories

Abstract

The thesis to be advanced in this essay is that two common genres of folk expression, riddle and narrative, carve out distinct reaIms of experience for artistic representation, and that they treat these separate realms in contrastive fashion. Specifically, riddles focus on the familiar domains of experience and render them strange, while spooky stories focus on the strange to render it more familiar. Finally, this differential usage of experience impIies an underIying folk cosmology.