by David Emery
An urban legend is an apocryphal, secondhand story, alleged to be true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific, embarrassing, ironic, or exasperating series of events that supposedly happened to a real person. As in the "classic" examples listed below, it's likely to be framed as a cautionary tale.
Here are some classic urban legends:
• The Microwaved Pet
• The Choking Doberman
• The Boyfriend's Death
• The Hook-Man
• Humans Can Lick, Too
• The Killer in the Backseat
The phrase "urban legend" entered the popular lexicon in the early 1980s with the publication of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand's first book on the subject, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (W.W. Norton, 1981).
LEGENDS SPREAD FROM PERSON TO PERSON
Urban legends are a type of folklore, defined as the handed-down beliefs, stories, songs, and customs of ordinary people ("the folk"). One way to differentiate urban legends from other narrative forms (for example, popular fiction, TV dramas, and even news stories) is to compare where they come from and how they're propagated. Unlike novels and short stories, which are produced by individual authors and formally published, for example, urban legends emerge spontaneously, spread "virally" from person to person, and are rarely traceable to a single point of origin. Urban legends tend to change over time with repetition and embellishment.
There can be as many variants as there are tellers of the tale.
THEY'RE USUALLY FALSE, BUT NOT ALWAYS
Though it's become synonymous in common parlance with "false belief," academic folklorists reserve the term "urban legend" (aka "contemporary legend") for a subtler and more complex phenomenon, namely the emergence and propagation of folk narratives — viral stories that are indeed usually false but which may also, on occasion, turn out to be true, or at least loosely based on real events…
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августа 16, 2017