John Miles Foley

A companion to ancient epic

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Teaching oral traditions

Research is beginning to unearth the astounding wealth of oral traditions that have served as a vital cultural activity and verbal art for peoples throughout the world, from antiquity to the present. In this thirteenth volume of the MLA series Options for Teaching, forty-two scholar-teachers bring these discoveries and rediscoveries from the scholarly forum to the classroom.

From Oral Performance to Paper-Text to Cyber-Edition

A performance is not a text, no more than an experience is an item or language is writing. At its very best a textual reproduction—with the palpable reality of the performance flattened onto a page and reduced to an artifact—is a script for reperformance, a libretto to be enacted and reenacted, a prompt for an emergent reality. I start by recalling this selfevident truth because our culturally sanctioned ritual of converting performances into texts submerges the fact that in faithfully following out our customary editorial program we are doing nothing less radical than converting living species into museum exhibits, reducing the flora and fauna of verbal art to fossilized objects. In a vital sense textual reproductions become cenotaphs: they memorialize and commemorate, but they can never embody. Even the seemingly neutral and innocuous terminology associated with the performance-to-print ritual bespeaks its underlying process and goal, if we pay attention to what these terms really imply. Oral traditional performances are collected, that is, caught and imprisoned in the anthropologist’s or folklorist’s game-bag via inscription on paper, acoustic media, or video media. Lest they wriggle away, these performances are in effect euthanized, stripped of the dynamism that characterizes their living identity in preparation for mounting on the game-hunter’s wall. Then come transcribing and editing, the initial stages in textual taxidermy, as scholars, now thankfully removed from the messiness of the original performance arena and comfortably ensconced in more clinical surroundings, render synthetic order unto the chaos of what once was a multi-dimensional, context-dependent experience. With publication the trajectory is complete: representing the organism as a one-dimensional textual photograph

The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology

Foreword by Alan Dundes Preface I. Philology, Anthropology, and the Homeric Question II. Milman Parry: From Homeric Text to Homeric Oral Tradition III. Albert Lord: Comparative Oral Traditions IV. The Making of a Discipline V. Recent and Future Directions Notes Bibliography Index