Abstract
CRITICAL APPROACHES TO POPULAR SONGS AND SONG LYRICS IN LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE
This article deals with the song as a genre neglected by both literary and folklore studies albeit its fictive quality. We first try to answer why literary studies have avoided this popular field. We then cull insights from Aristotle’s writings on tragedy to draw attention to the hybrid quality of songs. We propose five different approaches for the study of songs while emphasizing the relationship between lyrics, melodies and performances. We illustrate these methods through examples taken from the academic works done on the contemporary world of Turkish song writing. We argue that, in its capacity to reveal common emotions and thoughts of certain communities, the genre of the song is the subject-matter of both literary and folklore studies.
Keywords
Song lyrics, folklore, literary studies, Turkish songs, Aristotle
