Adaptive Occasions: Synchronic Correlatives in Traditional Folktale Adaptation

This essay examines a contemporary re-figuration of the traditional Appalachian folktale “Jack and the Giants’ Newground” through the lens of a recent performance event. The mechanisms of parody generate imaginative friction of foreground and background, a structural aesthetic of formal or functional congruence and indicial dissonance. I posit a key device for such genre-crossing adaptations, one I call the synchronic correlative. Synchronic correlatives are a form of meta-discursive parallelism, synchronic because they work as non-linear connectors between otherwise independent local/temporal constructs; they are thematic or indicial pivot points that serve to launch a tale type from one imaginative frame into another.