Stoff, Handlungsablauf und Varianz in der mündlichen Dichtung und die Frage nach Autor und geistigem Eigentum

By surveying the European history of narrative research on the one hand, and the history of collecting oral ethno-texts on the other, this paper presents different theoretical concepts reflecting the individual and collective shares in production and transmission. The discovery of the author in the narrator (and of the narrator in the author), and the distinction between plot, story, and discourse or between narrative structure and its phenomenological realization in the act of storytelling, allows us to determine the individual achievement of the narrator, who is also an author. What status has been accorded to this achievement since the twentieth century? Does it establish the narrator's literary ownership of his narrated text? And what are the roles of the researcher recording the text on tape and transcribing it, or of the editor who publishes the text in an anthology? [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]