Oral formulaic composition and associative linking in John Miles Foley's Pathways Project: a review * Oral Tradition and the Internet. Pathways of the Mind. John Miles Foley.

Abstract

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) was an eminent scholar who studied three traditions of oral poetry: Ancient Greek, Early Medieval English, and South Slavic. He both spearheaded the institutional establishment of oral tradition as an academic field and its popularization through public engagement. In 2002, Foley published a popular book, How to Read an Oral Poem, which introduces an analogy he would subsequently pursue at great length: ‘the singer’s and the audience’s experience of an oral poem is more like a Web-surfing expedition than a forensic examination of a textual corpse’ (Foley 2002b, p. 221). Foley based his last major work, the Pathways Project, on this analogy, spending the last 7 years of his life exploring the ‘fundamental similarities between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet’ (Foley 2005a). Foley undertook the Pathways Project among a number of other Web projects he initiated in the final decade of his career. To ‘deepen and enrich’ (Foley 2002b, p. xii) the ideas in How to Read an Oral Poem, he complemented the book with a Web-based ‘e-companion’ (Foley 2002a) offering ‘materials that don’t fit comfortably between the covers of a conventional book’, such as audio recordings. Foley also reworked his scholarly edition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey (Foley 2004), a South Slavic oral epic recorded in 1935 by Milman Parry, combining digitized audio with a transcription and an English translation, and making them freely available on the Web (Foley 2005b). In addition, he founded the Center for eResearch at the University of Missouri and moved the scholarly journal Oral Traditions to an open access model.