HALK HİKÂYELERİNDE TÜR SORUNU ÜZERİNE.

Classifications of oral narratives in folklore which are done by appeal to certain predetermined literary criteria and generalizations of these criteria for the totality of oral narratives in the related tradition seem to be of the controversial aspects of folklor literature. Discussions focusing on what a "folk narrative" is, mostly tend to rather question the concept of "genre". In this paper, I will take up the problem of genre in narratives that are produced by folk storytelling tradition. First, I present a scheme consisting of "object of narration", "narrator" and "interacting audience", and I focus on how this scheme and the communicative aspect of it becomes functional in questioning what a folk narrative could be taken for. In light of this suggestion, I argue that defining folk narrative as a contextual object of oral culture could provide us with an alternative viewpoint on how to approach the problem of genre in folk narratives. This definition and its implications move from the distinction between "genre" and "genre-related properties", which I discuss in the second part of the paper. Claiming that the contextual characteristics of folk narratives could be better evaluated by appeal to composite structures of genre-related properties underlying a narrative rather than to a transcendental hierarchy of genre, the argument is intended to contribute to the present literature a brief analysis of the key concepts regarding the problem of genre in folk narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]