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the teller of an urban legend is apt
to rely on skillful storytelling
and reference to putatively
trustworthy sources
A secondhand story just believable enough to be believed
Lecture Taken from:
Brunvand, Jan Harold. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.
Let's Review:
• It's a narrative.
• It's alleged to be true.
• It's just plausible (sometimes just barely plausible) enough to be believed.
• Its veracity is unproven.
• It's of spontaneous (or indeterminate) origin.
• It varies in the telling.
• It's likely to take the form of a cautionary tale.
• It circulates by being passed from individual to individual orally.
• It's attributed to a trustworthy secondhand
sources
Emerge spontaneously and are rarely traceable to a single source
Pop rocks and Coca-Cola can explode your stomach!
Are you for real?!
horrific, embarrassing, ironic or exasperating series of events
that supposedly happened to
a real person
One way to differentiate urban legends from other narrative forms (e.g., popular fiction, TV dramas, or news stories) is to compare where they come from and how they're propagated.