Folk Tales in the Mediterranean Region

Mustapha Chadli - MOROCCO

The researcher stops at the role of folk tales in the Mediterranean, narrative genders, and types such as myths, fairy or symbolic metrical tales, metrical myths, and narrative poetry transformed through ages to metrical tales, animal stories, fantastic myths, comedic and amusing tales and puzzles. The researcher presents a study of the objects of folk tales, their purposes that constitute fantastic or social objects for a number of Mediterranean countries, a common imagination space in which interferes tales of typical people or deviated facts. The researcher emphasizes that the comparison of objects and types opens horizons for oral literature researches, promises fruitful results, clarifies the mythic, symbolic, and folkloric aspects the cultures under study, and enables to show the relative characteristic of a tradition compared to others, and illustrates what characterizes a narrative type from the other. Mediterranean region is a space for meeting and for symbolic exchange in which elements and parts of different savant and popular traditions are fused. In fact, many tales behave objects and element of a culture belonging to other tale types and to other geographical regions. Part of them constitute a savant part including 2 or 3 if not many types of tales, hence the resistance to any classification. The researcher goes into oral traditions nowadays in the 2 banks of the Mediterranean that recognize variation and evolution, where some ineffective traditions and genders are abandoned, but retrieved in some circles for special manifestations (religious, national, or cultural feasts). On the opposite, other genders of the oral literature, conditioned with modern society, boom in spite of their differences once we move from the north to the south, from cities to country sides, mountains and desert, and from the center to peripheral near or far regions. In general, it seems that “the deeper transformation of the contemporary oral cultures touches the content part: the role played by the social integration level on the racial and educational level has faded to accord value to the social contexts that is very criticized: today, social cultures suggest opposite things to contemporary society, and refusing attitudes that take a denial attribute. This evolution is an outcome of the fact that culture is still far away from the faithful cultural currents.