Language, Memory, and Sense Perception in the Religious and Technological Culture of Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1995)

Abstract

The two persons in whose honor this lecture is named were North American classicists of eminence who had acquired additional training in the oral traditional epics of the former Yugoslavia, an achievement unequaled among scholars of their time. Long before interdisciplinary studies had come into scholarly and curricular vogue, Milman Parry and Albert Lord had attained a literacy in comparative studies that was both severely academic and daringly imaginative. Almost singlehandedly, they initiated the distinct academic field of oral traditional literature, which concerns itself with the study of compositional, performative, and aesthetic aspects of living oral traditions and of texts dependent on oral tradition. Strictly speaking, the work inaugurated by Parry and Lord, and energetically carried forward by John Miles Foley, aspires to a new poetics informed by our growing knowledge of oral tradition. By now the field has grown into a scholarship that cuts across a wide spectrum of the humanities and social sciences, bridging national and religious boundaries and encompassing the multicultural body of the human race.