John Miles Research Articles

How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem

Poetry readings have become a standard element in the practice of poetry in the English-speaking world over the past fifty years, yet their significance as anything more than entertainment remains little understood.1 Literary studies has lagged behind another field that has made significant steps in the study of poetry performance—oral poetics. My title alludes to John Miles Foley’s recent textbook (2002) on the study of oral poetry, which offers both a comprehensive account of different theories of oral poetry and an extended introduction to his own contribution to the study of the units of composition. Foley’s work, like that of other ethnographers of oral poetry, has important implications for the study of the relation between any written poetry and its performance, even among the most literate, print-based cultures. My own research into the contemporary Anglophone poetry reading in which a written, often printed, text is read aloud, began with a puzzle: the seeming dissonance between the opportunities for understanding a poem when read silently and the fleeting impressions presented by an oral performance of the same text. Poetry readings can seem explicable if one thinks of them as entertainment, or part of the celebrity system, or as performances of a verbal score that like most musical scores can only be appreciated properly once converted by instruments and voices into sonic form. All of these variations do take place and important poetry has emerged in each area. Why then is it that such poetry is in the minority, and that the main body of contemporary poetry is also regularly performed by its authors and yet would seem to require the kind of thoughtful, prolonged attention that only silent reading of a printed text can supply? This question turns out to go much deeper than it would appear. It requires an almost complete rethinking of what we understand as the reading of literary texts in contemporary Western culture. The study of performance

The Kalevala and the World's Traditional Epics (review)

The Kalevala and World's Traditional Epics. Studia Fennica Folkloristica. Edited by Lauri Honko. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002. When a folk-literary scholar, not herself an expert in poetry, digs into thick texture of this substantial volume on Kalevala and traditional epics, she is very soon enveloped in a quite rare elsewhere in folk-literary scholarship. Not only do scholars proudly proclaim elitism of their object of research, but they also imply that research of epics is an elite branch among varieties of folk-literary study. Most of them situate their research across boundary of literature and oral tradition. Their study is thus most pertinent to all who want to critically examine constructed dimension of category of folk literature in general, and specifically oral literature. One need only read a few stanzas or lines of any piece of poetry to sense poetic refinement and skill invested in creation of poetry. Only seldom does one encounter that level of sophistication in folk prose, and then only in specific forms of folktale that tend to straddle written-oral divide. I am reminded of a discussion I had with late editor of this volume, Lauri Honko, after we had been listening to a brilliant paper on urban legends delivered by one of our colleagues. Honko congratulated himself on having access to such textual riches as Finnish laments or South Indian epics, which he rated much higher than somewhat-in his eyes-banal oral narratives of modern urban cultures. The volume encompasses twenty-eight essays by twenty-seven authors. Honko himself contributed both a theoretical introductory essay and a more traditional comparative study of epics in eastern Baltic region. The essays break down thematically as follows: Kalevala across borders (five essays); European traditional epics (six essays); American and African traditional epics (two essays); Asian epics (six essays); and traditional epics of eastern Baltic region (nine essays). On whole they reflect intensified interest and common work done by scholars in last two decades, led and inspired by Honko himself through epic network he initiated within framework of Folklore Fellows International. Another important and leading figure in field is his close colleague John Miles Foley, founder and editor of Oral Tradition, who has contributed to volume an article that deals with metonymic character of oral with reference to an assumed pool of (113; cf. Honko, Textualizing Sin Epic [Folklore Fellows Communications 264], 1998; Textualization of Oral Epics, 2000). Although dynamics between persistence of traditional forms as textual rhetoric (120) and arena (121) may seem to be yet another refinement of competence-performance complex (e.g., Briggs, Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art, 1998), Foley formulates astutely what seems to be at present a dominant intuition in studies: the old model of Great Divide between orality and literacy has entirely given way in most quarters, pointing toward accompanying demise of absolutist dichotomy of performance versus document (121). That may also provide generalizing perspective that makes this volume as a whole worthwhile reading for all folk-literary scholars and probably textual scholars, without distinguishing between genre and mode. Thus good or bad news, depending on one's point of view, or maybe no news at all, is fact that so-called Homeric question has definitely not disappeared or been rendered irrelevant by recent scholarship. In this sense assumption that A. B. Lord laid down in his Singer of Tales (1960), whereby oral-formulaic theory was to put an end to debate whether Iliad and Odyssey were textual culmination of an oral tradition of generations or rather stroke of a unique genius, Homer, has been disproved. …

The Proof of the Pudding: Proverbs and Gender in the Performance Arena

Context of use often determines the final, embedded meaning of an aphorism. Use in a ‘performance arena' proceeds through a complex interaction between folklore users and audiences, and a shared set of meanings which is invoked by the saying. Issues of status, gender, and age of proverb users and audiences also influence performance and meaning. Building on the work of folklorist John Miles Foley and others, this study outlines features of the performance arena for the use of aphorisms, usingElihu in Job 32.6-10, and a slave woman's use of a proverbial sayingin the Westcar Papyrus. A visual model of proverb performance based on computer object editing is proposed.

On dead subjects: a rejoinder to Lundberg on (a) psychoanalytic rhetoric

Owing to a longstanding commitment to the autonomous, self-transparent subject, many roads have not been taken in rhetorical studies. Our present conversation about Lacanian psychoanalysis represents one of those roads, which is the most radical route stemming from the little traveled thoroughfare of the “rhetoric of the interior.” Insofar as its central category is the dynamic unconscious, psychoanalysis in general represents a theory of an inside or interiority that has largely been ignored, and sometimes attacked, in favor or defense of surfaces and exteriorities (e.g., fantasy themes and rhetorical visions, rational argument in ideal speech situations, and so on). Despite the pioneering work on Jung and mythic criticism by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, despite articulate calls for psychoanalytic research by Barbara Biesecker, Michael J. Hyde, and Loyd S. Pettegrew, and despite the remarkable, interdisciplinary work of Henry Krips, among NCA-style rhetorical studies scholars, psychoanalysis has been the place of dead roads, indeed, the place of dead subjects. Christian Lundberg’s welcome and insightful critique of “Refitting Fantasy” ought to be read as a road sign of sorts, indicating not only an exciting route for research, but also the number of places it might go. In general, Lundberg argues that a critical perspective that begins in the imaginary overlooks the master’s focus on the Symbolic order, thereby missing the true locus of rhetoric in Lacan’s work (principally, “tropology”). Further, Lundberg argues that a critical attention to fantasies is limited to discrete texts and intersubjective encounters, thereby avoiding an opportunity to do true Lacanian rhetorical criticism. The consequence of an approach focused on the criticism of (pre-)conscious and unconscious fantasies, he implies, is twofold. First, it promotes a perspective akin to the project of “ego-psychology” and, thus, relies on the “naive psychologism of solely intersubjectively mediated accounts of subject formation,” which bars scholars from the pursuit of a deeper, more

Diet and Diabetes

This is the second of a series of articles on presentations at the American Diabetes Association Annual Meeting, Orlando, Florida, 4–8 June 2004, addressing issues related to diet and current approaches of surgical treatment of obesity. John Miles (Rochester, MN) discussed effects of meal ingestion on protein metabolism, acute effects of dietary protein and amino acids on glucose metabolism, and effects of protein in persons with diabetes, noting that insulin decreases endogenous proteolysis during a mixed meal. In a study of protein ingestion in persons with diabetes, plasma amino acids and, subsequently, urea levels increased. Usually, increasing protein ingestion is associated with protein oxidation, which is important as there is no physiologic mechanism for accumulation of protein stores, while conversely we adapt to decreasing dietary protein by decreasing amino acid oxidation. The effect of protein on glucose metabolism can be studied by measurement of arterial-venous balance, with evidence that amino acids displace glucose as metabolic fuels. Assessing independent effects of protein and of insulin on systemic and regional glucose metabolism, Miles showed evidence that insulin decreases circulating amino acid levels, and that with addition of amino acid infusion, there is decreased insulin-mediated glucose uptake and decreased insulin-mediated suppression of hepatic glucose output. Thus, amino acids cause a form of insulin resistance. Following acute protein ingestion in normal persons, however, there is little change in glucose homeostasis, presumably reflecting increases in insulin and in glucagon levels. As far as chronic effects of isocaloric high- or low-protein diets administered for 5 weeks in persons with diabetes, there is evidence of a decrease in glucose and triglyceride levels with a high-protein diet, as well as a trend to weight loss. The energy cost of fat ingestion and storage is low, and that for carbohydrate is modest, but there is a 25–30% thermic effect …

Die waarde van kognitiewe semantiek in die analisefase van vertaling

The value of cognitive semantics in the analysis phase of translation One of the most challenging tasks facing the trainee translator relates to the analysis phase of translation. If the analysis is inadequate it is unlikely that the subsequent translation will be acceptable. This article takes Cognitive Semantics as point of departure and focuses on the theoretical aspects of force dynamics (Talmy, 1985 and 2000) by indicating that the understanding of schematic categories and schematic meaning does not only contribute to the pre-translation analysis phase in the translation process but could also enhance the understanding of the process per se. Force dynamics is discussed in relation to subjectification, perspective and grounding. It is argued that the principles of force dynamics are applicable to the way in which the translator should approach a text in the analysis phase. The principles of force dynamics are illustrated by making use of the short story “Voorgevoel” by John Miles. The text is in the first instance analysed by placing the focus on the role of the narrator as conceptualiser. Subsequently, the working of force dynamics in the texts is discussed. Finally it is indicated how the principles of force dynamics also act as metaphor for the process of translation as such.

The Implications of "Orality" for Studies of the Biblical Text

Efforts to examine the oral aspect of biblical texts date to the early part of the twentieth century. Since then, the tide of studies has flowed and ebbed. A swirl of activity during the 1950’s and 60’s slowed to a drizzle in the 70’s and early 80’s. This drought was broken with the appearance in 1983 of the ground-breaking study by Werner Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel, which marked the beginning of biblical scholars’ growing awareness of and engagement with the works of Eric Havelock, Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Ruth Finnegan, Jack Goody, and Walter Ong—and in subsequent years, it should be added, the works of John Miles Foley. Since then the flow of studies has steadily increased, surpassing the efforts of any previous decade. Needless to say, it is hoped that the twenty-first century will prove as fruitful as the late twentieth century for studies of the oral aspects of biblical texts. My goal in this article is to highlight some of the ways in which the application of studies in oral tradition to biblical texts has begun to foment a shift in thinking among biblical scholars by encouraging us to look at the biblical texts in relation to their oral-aural contexts and by considering how these oral-aural texts functioned in the ancient world. Because these studies have taken us in many different directions, my paper is structured as a series of “sound bytes” loosely grafted together. My intent is to be suggestive rather than comprehensive, to describe some of the places we have been and some of the places we have yet to go. Before I begin, let me offer three caveats. First, most of my comments will be directed towards studies of the Second Testament, as this is the locus of my own research. Nonetheless, a number of issues that I raise find resonance in both Testaments. Second, while I will cite some studies, many more will be referenced only by allusion; if the study that has been central to your work, or perhaps is your work, is omitted, I beg your pardon. Finally, while I have endeavored to

Myth and Literary History: Two Germanic Examples

The Albert Lord and Milman Parry Lecture for 2003 Under the care of its founder, John Miles Foley, the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, together with its journal Oral Tradition, has become the preeminent institution in its field in America; and as the field itself widens, the Center's importance in the study of the humanities can only grow. The annual Lord and Parry Lecture Series is one aspect of that widening outreach, and I feel very honored to be able to follow distinguished and provocative humanists in the series and to follow, though more distantly, Lord and Parry themselves. The topic agreed on for my contribution was the slippery subject of myth, my current preoccupation, not only because of some detailed research projects in hand, but more urgently as a new undergraduate seminar on the general topic looms on my immediate horizon. There's nothing like that kind of undergraduate teaching to force one to return to basic ideas. Bless them, undergraduates won't let a body hide behind philology! I realize that myth fits only problematically into the format of the Lord and Parry lectures and into the mandate of the journal Oral Tradition; in fact as far as my skimming eye could discover, no article in Oral Tradition's eighteen luminous years has confessed in its title to a principle concern with myth—admittedly this impression was not the product of meticulous research. In any case, the Center and the journal usually deal concretely (even if also theoretically) with the form, content, and performance of oral literature or else with its cultural matrix, especially in oralities and literacies. These topics been among my main interests too ever since my understanding of literature was destabilized and refashioned by my teacher Albert Lord about 1963. Less famously, however, Lord had a keen interest in myth as well. In 1968-69, the year I worked for him as head teaching fellow in the General Education course known as Hum 9, we tried, between sit-ins or microphone take-overs by the SDS and tear-gas attacks by the authorities, to teach some formalist approaches to myth, such as that of Lord Raglan's famous hero pattern. That's when it became clear to me that Mr. Lord (to use the form of [End Page 3] address current at Harvard at that time) was a crypto-ritualist like Vladimir Propp, whom we also endeavored to interpret that year to restless student hordes who quite unreasonably could not understand why American lives should be sacrificed in an imperial adventure. (Thank goodness there's nothing like that going on today: the times, they have a-changed.) The myth-ritual approach perhaps appealed to Mr. Lord, as it still does to me, because it ties myth, which constantly threatens to grade off into formlessness, to a ritual that can be apprehended and described in formalist and performative terms. Insofar as a myth can be the words spoken at a ritual, Jane Harrison's "things said over things done," the concept is doubly opened to structural or formal approaches, first by being a definite, particular utterance and second by being grounded in actions that presumably find echoes in the utterance. The myth-ritual school, which we still find full of vigor in the exciting scholarship of Walter Burkert (e.g., 1966, 1983, 1987, and 1996)and, somewhatattenuated, in some of my own recent work (1999, forthcoming a), brings the study of myth into the same perceptual orbit we move in as students of oral literature. Meanwhile, the concept of myth itself as generally and more widely understood simply will not be pinioned either to a certain utterance or to certain actions, with the result that students of particular myths have to jettison a huge semantic penumbra around the word "myth" in order to arrive at their formal clarities. In my own field of competence, early Germanic mythology, the ritual connection is more often than not purely hypothetical and often...

Oral Traditional Approaches to Old English Verse

Oral Traditional Approaches to Old English Verse Heather Maring (bio) Since the publication of Francis P. Magoun’s (1953) seminal article on the formula in Anglo-Saxon narrative verse, oral traditional approaches in the field of Old English have undergone a number of transitions, in the process growing more sophisticated and varied in technique and application. Early excitement over the aptness of Parry-Lord “formulas” and “themes” has evolved in definition and purpose: not being content with spotting a formula or theme for its own sake, scholars now interpret and evaluate the highly nuanced oral-aesthetic strategies embodied in the “traditional phraseology” and “type-scenes” of Old English verse (see Renoir 1988; Foley 1991). Early misguided attempts to pour Old English poetry into a mold generated by the study of Homeric and South Slavic poetics have given way to oral-formulaic technique rooted in the specifics of a Germanic language and its idiosyncratic prosody (see Foley 1990). Furthermore, heated debate over oral versus literate provenance has subsided in favor of a more modulated conception of an oral-literate continuum or, to use a slightly different image, of genre- and poem-specific meshings of oral Germanic and literate Latin-Christian rhetorical devices and subject matter (see Renoir 1988; O’Keeffe 1990). From the contemporary reader’s viewpoint one result of these studies is that passages of poems that once seemed either confusing or pleasantly mysterious have grown in coherence and power: optimally, with the filter of oral traditional interpretation these texts seem to flip from a slightly warped 2-D image to a high-tech 3-D surround-sound experience. In addition to oral-formulaic theory, Old English scholars are drawing upon such approaches as Reader-Response theory, Ethnography of Speaking, Ethnopoetics, Performance theory, and Immanent Art in search of ways to interpret and respect the aesthetic vitality of the extant corpus of verse (see, for instance, Howe 1993 and Doane 1994). Recently, John Miles Foley (2002) has called attention to the promising application of ethnopoetic approaches developed along different lines by Dennis Tedlock (1972) and Dell Hymes (1981). Ethnopoetics may be summarized as the textual [End Page 219] preservation of both words and the meaning-rich formal and paralinguistic features employed in the performance of a poem, whether that performance is live or has already been encoded in a literary medium. In a field such as Old English, where the only available “performances” must be reconstrued from vellum “scripts,” Hymes’ structural approach is more applicable. Drawing on ethnopoetics, oral-formulaic theory, and immanent art, Foley creates a modern-English structural translation of Beowulf’s opening lines, making apparent such aesthetically loaded features as half-lines, the prologue, an inset story, proverbs, and the sea voyage/ship burial scene. Hopefully this precedent will encourage similar attempts. Imagine the entire poetic corpus ethnopoetically reconfigured and retranslated to the best of our abilities! Such a project would no doubt graphically and acoustically wed many insights into the aesthetic resources being tapped by a poem’s manipulation of traditional patterns and foster further research and debates. At minimum, two paths employing ethnopoetics are forseeable: one would involve the creation of original-language editions referencing significant oral traditional cues, the other ethnopoetic translations into modern English. For example, a structural translation (or perhaps even better, structural translations) of the so-called “elegies” (The Seafarer, The Wanderer, The Wife’sLament, Deor, and others) would inevitably shed light on their unique synthesis of features from native Germanic genres and those derived from Christian-Latin influences. 1 Due to confusion over issues such as genre, rhetorical purpose, number of speakers, and a poem’s “back-story,” the majority of the poems falling into the category of “elegy” have a wide variety of conflicting interpretations. Perhaps modern English translations foregrounding such oral-traditional strategies as riddling diction, proverbs, and the typical scenes of Exile, Beasts of Battle, and Joy in the Hall would not only contribute to richer and more cogent expositions, but also make more apparent the cognitive filters or interpretations that a specific scholar-translator applies to the Old English, whether at the micro-level of morphemes or at the macro-level of narrative. I can imagine...

Oral Narrative Studies in China

Oral Narrative Studies in China Mark Bender (bio) Oral narratives fall into two broad classifications in China. The first is “folk literature,” and the second is urban-based narratives performed by professional or avocational performers. The field of study focusing on oral literature (koutou wenxue) is concerned with traditional genres that tend to be lumped under rather general though not necessarily descriptive headings such as folktale, myth, legend, children’s stories, animal tales, narrative poems, epics, and so forth. These categories, introduced into China from the West (to some extent via Japan) by the early twentieth century and modified to suit Chinese needs by scholars such as the late Zhong Jingwen, are still the basis of the text-based approach to oral literature followed by most scholars and cultural workers in China today. It is assumed that most of these forms of narrative (as well as folksongs) exist and are collected among rural people. In recent decades, massive folklore collecting projects have resulted in the anthologizing of a huge number of texts (rather highly censored in the early decades after 1949) in a wide variety of venues, including newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and book series. At times some were used to promote political agendas and many texts have found their way into a variety of popular media. Moreover, a large number of works have been published as “inner-circulating” documents for scholars only since 1949. In recent years, as strictures have relaxed, most scholars prefer the public forums. Though the bulk of published materials are “text-based” (sometimes with little or no description of the performance process and context), in recent years a small number of younger, well-positioned Chinese scholars have turned a critical eye to developments in folklore studies in Europe and the United States and have begun experimenting with a bundle of approaches that, if considered from a distance, might be called the “oral pragmatics” school of Western folklore/folk narrative studies. The body of theory constituting this syncretizing approach (which seems pragmatic both in the sense of descriptive methodology and ethnopoetic politics) wields a theoretical tool-kit that includes Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory, a [End Page 236] performance/contextual/ethnography of communication approach, Lauri Honko’s ideas on the “folklore process” and the “process of textualization,” reception aesthetics, John Miles Foley’s ideas on “traditional referentiality” (and his syncretic approach), and research on the psychophysical implications of performance. Among the most active of the younger Chinese scholars and editors is Chao Gejin, a scholar of the Mongol ethnic nationality in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. His groundbreaking work on the oral poetics of Mongol epic singing (2000) is the first full-length study of an ethnic minority tradition in China to fully utilize aspects of many of the approaches just listed, introducing translations and explanations of key terms in the text. Major folklore journals in China have in recent years also included translations of what they perceive as key works of Western folklore studies, including a number of key chapters on basic approaches translated from Foley’s Teaching Oral Traditions (1998). Other innovative voices include those in the productive Bamo Sisters’ Studio, a small group of Yi nationality sisters (including Bamo Ayi and Bamo Qubumo) who have helped bring an international profile to the large Yi nationality in southwest China through their studies on oral and written poetic narrative, ritual specialist texts, a recent museum exhibit on material culture at the University of Washington, and a Harvard conference in 2001. The situation of Yi folk narrative studies is exceptional, however, as many groups have a low profile within as well as outside of China and funding for local research organs is inconsistent nationwide. It will be interesting to see where this oral pragmatics approach goes in China, given the large number of local oral traditions still available for study, despite the increasing waves of modernization. Another large body of oral or oral-connected narrative also exists in China, though its items tend to be classified as “performing narrative arts” (quyi) or, when written, as forms of “vernacular literature” (suwenxue). These narrative arts, many of which were prosimetric in form and had a musical dimension...

Medieval Icelandic Studies

Medieval Icelandic Studies Gísli Sigurðsson (bio) In the field of medieval Icelandic studies, “the oral tradition” refers to the accumulated and encyclopedic knowledge (both sacred and profane) that was passed on from person to person before and after writing was first introduced into the newly Christianized society of Iceland. This tradition commonly used stories and poetry as a medium, as well as special training in the oratorical art of law. Iceland, which had previously lain undiscovered in the middle of the North Atlantic, was first settled by people from Scandinavia, Scotland, Ireland, Shetland, the Orkneys, and the Hebrides in the late ninth century, a mixture of pagans and others who had come into contact with Christianity. The people of Iceland decided to accept Christianity as their official religion in the year 1000, thus providing an opening for a more systematic use of writing and books than before. At first, that writing was used exclusively within the Church, but in the twelfth century it gradually began to involve a broader cultural sphere, documenting historical memory (from the church’s viewpoint), legal texts, and, from around 1200, secular accounts dealing with the kings and earls of Scandinavia and the Orkneys. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, stories about local farmers and chieftains in Iceland began to appear (the sagas). In the thirteenth century, the technique of writing was also used to augment the oral training of poets by providing a written mythological background for the poetic language as well as a means of recording the traditional oral poetry that dealt with the gods and heroes of the Germanic peoples (the Eddas). All of this is so unique in content and so different in nature from the learned book culture of medieval Europe that it cannot be explained or interpreted except as a literary reflection of an oral tradition, in other words as “orally derived texts” to use John Miles Foley’s expression (1991). It nonetheless lies within the nature of the oral tradition, as in the art of writing, that one can expect some influence, both ideologically and [End Page 207] structurally, to have come from books brought to Iceland from the continent (Clover 1982). Confirmation of the broad and anonymous social memory reflected in the written texts about when and how the country was first settled towards the end of the ninth century is found in modern archaeology. The same applies to the social memory concerning the settlement of Greenland and the voyages that went from there and Iceland to the New World (called Helluland, Markland, and Vinland in the tradition) around the year 1000. All of this was remembered without the aid of the written word, but the accounts were of course influenced by the active rules and needs of the art of storytelling, which would have shaped the form of presentation. This information could not have been made up or obtained by writers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from any other source than the oral tradition. This underlines the fact that if we wish to make any sense of the extant written documents, we need to try and draw up as clear a picture as possible of the oral tradition that lay behind them. Furthermore, we need to take that tradition into account when reading over these documents. The most interesting new direction in this field comes when we move away from the old argument about whether and if these texts were based on an oral tradition (Andersson 1964; Danielsson 2002a and 2002b), and simply accept the need to read them as the product and reflection of such a tradition. This enables us to utilise all the knowledge gained from the fieldwork and theoretical discussion about the oral tradition of our own time, practically applying it to the world of these early texts (Clover 1986; Sigurðsson 2002). By using such an approach, we can reach a better understanding of the historical development from the oral stage to that of the written culture (something that was taking place at the same time as our early texts came into being). Indeed, we gain a fuller appreciation of the literary aesthetics of the Eddas and sagas when reading...

Oral Tradition and Biblical Scholarship

Interest in oral tradition and the border where oral meets written has been an integral part of modern biblical scholarship. The very foundation of “form-criticism” as practiced by Hermann Gunkel and more recently Claus Westermann involves the search for traditional oral forms as they may have been performed and received in actual life settings. Close work with the recurring patterns of biblical language and content has been influenced moreover by the studies of Albert Lord and Milman Parry, so that a number of analyses have explored the possibility that pieces of biblical literature are rooted in oral performance (Robert Culley, David Gunn). In recent years, the shift in orality studies, reflected in the work of John Miles Foley and the many articles that have appeared in Oral Tradition, has affected the way in which biblical scholars approach the topic of orality in ancient Israel. No longer are many scholars convinced that they can uncover original oral Urforms, nor that the most seemingly oral-traditional or formulaic pieces are earliest in date. I have argued that Israelite literature includes many oral “registers” reflecting various tastes, functions, and milieus. The most formulaic may be the latest in date, for an ongoing oral tradition of some kind is a constant in every culture. Similarly, scholars are increasingly sophisticated about the nature of “oral” and “written” and about the meaning and nature of literacy in traditional or ancient cultures. Within a “great divide” conceptual framework, Biblical studies tended to suggest that early, simple oral works gave way to sophisticated written works produced by a literate elite. Scholars are now beginning to see that orality and literacy exist on a continuum and that there is an interplay between the two modalities, a feedback loop of sorts. More is to be learned about Israelite culture and the preserved corpus of ancient literature in the Bible by attention to this interplay, to the variety of oral traditional forms present, and to the way in which the written works of scripture are heavily informed by the assumptions of an essentially oral culture in style, content, and meaning.

Oral Tradition in Bible and New Testament Studies

Modern biblical scholarship is largely a child of the high tech of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It developed its basic assumptions about and approaches to biblical texts in working with the print Bible, the first major, mechanically constructed book in early modernity. For this reason, the historical, critical scholarship of the Bible has risked laboring under a cultural anachronism, projecting modernity’s communications culture upon the ancient media world. However, despite its resolutely text-centered habits, historical criticism has by no means been unaware of orality’s role in the formation of biblical texts. The impact of form criticism, the method devised to deal with oral tradition, on biblical scholarship of both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament has been immense. Today, form criticism is besieged with multiple problems, the most significant of which is its complicity with post-Gutenberg assumptions about ancient dynamics of communication. Not only are biblical texts by and large located in close affinity to speech, but the form critical project has turned out to be largely misconceived. Orality studies, therefore, challenge biblical scholarship to rethink fundamental concepts of the Western humanistic legacy such as text and intertextuality, reading, writing and composing, memory and imagination, speech and oral/scribal interfaces, author and tradition. And they invite us to be suspicious of imagining tradition exclusively in closedspace, text-to-text relations, and instead to grow accustomed to notions such as compositional dictation, memorial apperception, auditory reception, and the interfacing of memory and manuscript. Contemporary research in orality is, therefore, anything but a mere embellishment of textual studies. John Miles Foley’s observation that “what we are wrestling with is an inadequate theory of verbal art” applies with particular force to biblical studies

Surgeon Commander John Miles Fitzpatrick OBE Royal Navy

Surgeon Commander John Miles Fitzpatrick OBE Royal Navy

The Epic Voice

Epic Voice. Edited by Alan D. Hodder and Robert E. Meagher. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Pp. 157, introduction, illustrations, maps, notes, index. $54.95 cloth, $15.00 paper); How to Read an Oral Poem. By John Miles Foley. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp xviii + 256, prologue, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95 cloth, $19.95 paper); Myth: A New Symposium. Edited by Gregory Schrempp and William Hansen. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 262, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliographies, index. $49.95 cloth) All three of these books, like ancient lamps, light familiar, well-worn paths to guide us to new comprehension of myth (or-to borrow a term used by Barre Toelken in his contribution to the third of the volumes under discussion-of fictional traditional narrative [88]). Epic Voice sets a thoughtful tone for the discussion. Here the editors have assembled essays written by five senior scholars, in which decades of learning and thought [are used] to open the reader's mind to the fullness of the work at hand (1). five works discussed are from five different venues of the ancient world: Mesopotamia (The Epic of Gilgamesh), Israel (stories of David), Greece (The Odyssey), India (The Ramayana), and Ireland (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley [Tain Bo Cuailnge]). Taken as a whole, these essays bring the reader to dramatic new levels of understanding through use of multiple examples to illustrate the cross-fertilization of oral and written narrative. volume a course-in-a-text. How to Read an Oral Poem, by John Miles Foley, an engaging work based on both fieldwork and archival research, whose playful title announces a discussion of relations between orality and literacy. volume illuminates words, meanings, and usage in the work of four different oral poets representing four different oral poetic traditions both ancient and contemporary: a Tibetan paper-singer, a North American slam poet, a South African praise poet, and an ancient Greek poet. As Foley suggests, Our challenge to fashion a model for oral poetry that realistically portrays, in both its unity and its diversity, a kind of biology that allows for species differentiation within the composite genus (38). He proposes a system of media categories (38) and discusses them. Foley's well-informed book carries the reader through eight chapters addressing, respectively, oral poetry; contexts and reading; performance theory; ethnopoetics; traditional implications; types of proverbs; examples of readings; and South Slavic oral poetry-an extended discussion in which he draws parallels to other examples in the text. Foley's afterword engages the reader in a fascinating comparative discussion of oral poetry and electronic media, specifically the Internet. The key to these possibilities, he says, is to recognize that-like the Internet we browse, learn from, and purchase on-oral poetry amounts to a linked series of pathways. Manifold destinations await us [. . .] (221). Myth: A New Symposium, the last of the three volumes under review, a valuable interdisciplinary collection that both updates the contemporary study of myth and reconsiders its namesake, Myth: A Symposium, the groundbreaking interdisciplinary issue of the Journal of American Folklore (1955, simultaneously published as an independent anthology) that was based upon an Indiana University symposium on myth and famously edited by Thomas A. …

Macpherson's Ossian: Trying to Hit a Moving Target

Macpherson's Ossian:Trying to Hit a Moving Target John Miles Foley (bio) The cluster of articles on James Macpherson and the poems of the legendary Ossian, in issue 454 of JAF, offers us up-to-date information and helpful perspectives on an inherently fascinating phenomenon. The four authors argue precisely and cogently for their points of view, and the readership of JAF will remain in their debt for a clear-headed perspective on a knotty problem in the history of folklore studies. For this reader, however, the most striking feature of the collective presentation is the set of contingencies it brings to light, especially the ever-changing historical trajectory it documents and the open-ended variety of frames of reference it suggests. That the Ossian controversy should have remained a heated issue, full of contradictions and apparently irresolvable impasses, for all these years is perhaps no surprise. That the same controversy also tracks the development of folklore theory from at least the early 19th century onward to the present day—serving as a bellwether for period-bound concepts of heritage, identity, and verbal art—is more remarkable. No wonder, then, that reception of Ossian's art has run the gamut from extravagant enthusiasm to disdainful invective, or that each author's concerns illuminate a different but complementary aspect of Macpherson-become-Ossian. It is always a challenge to hit a moving target. In the spirit of "Dialogues," I propose to take up a few salient ideas from the four articles and briefly examine them in a comparative context. Most of my analogues will be drawn from South Slavic oral poetry, until recently very much a living tradition and one that was extremely well collected in the 19th and 20th centuries. Other comparisons will be made to ancient Greek poems ascribed to Homer and others, to the largely anonymous Anglo-Saxon poetry from early medieval England, and to slam poetry, an oral poetic tradition presently gaining momentum in contemporary North America. Juxtaposing these parallels is a way of recognizing the value of the Ossian collection and of thanking its authors for their stimulating words; hopefully, it also satisfies the intent of "Dialogues," which at the root of its Greek lineage is the near-equivalent of "swapping stories."1 One of the most convincing of James Porter's contentions revolves around the vexed issue of the "authenticity" of what Macpherson presented to an international audience as translations of bona fide oral tradition. Porter observes that modern folklore [End Page 99] theory has left such concepts in its wake, no longer imagining a pure, unadulterated Volkspoesie but inquiring into what transformations and adaptations lie beneath the visible surface of any instance or publication of verbal art.2 He sees Macpherson's role as that of "both a liminal figure and a mediator," someone who acted as a kind of gatekeeper operating from the assumption of an epic tradition that had devolved into fragments and just as particular a concept of the audience he wished to reach and the poetic self-portrait he wished them to view. Over a complex and multilayered lifetime, Porter's Macpherson reacted intelligently and consistently to a wide array of influences—intellectual, political, sociocultural, and historical. His adroitness in responding to these influences resulted in an international reception that was unique in drawing both unbridled approbation and more than occasional calumny. These sound observations help us not only to understand the phenomenon of Macpherson but also to follow the orbit of folklore studies from Romantic nationalism and the search for ethnic identity to today's more characteristic inquiry into the contextual and especially political conditions that frame any folklore event. For example, consider the publication program undertaken by Vuk Stefanovi Karadžič, the great mid-19th-century ethnographer, lexicographer, and collector of Serbian narodne pjesme or "folk songs." We will have more to say about his actual collection and processing methods later on, but for the moment let us concentrate on his implicit aims and his presentation of the oral poems that won so fervent and wide-ranging an audience all over Europe.3 For his second volume, subtitled the "oldest heroic songs" (pjesme junačke najstarije), Karad...

Textualization of Oral Epics by Lauri s> Honko (review)

REVIEWS I09 Honko, Lauri (ed.). Textualization of OralEpics.Trends in LinguisticsStudies and Monographs, I28. Mouton de Gruyter,Berlinand New York,2000. viii + 390 pp. Bibliographies.Index. DM 258.oo. 'TEXTUALIZING oralepicsin writingis a missionimpossible.Oralperformance cannot be capturedin lettersandwords'(p. vii).LauriHonko's opening words direct us to the central issue of this splendid interdisciplinaryvolume how the 'impossible'taskhas in factbeen attempted.They alsointroducesome farreaching critical explorations of the once simple-sounding concepts of 'text' and literary'work'which will interestscholarsof many backgrounds,certainly notjust specialistsin 'epic'or 'orality'.How, afterall, do literarytextscome to be as they are?What can we learnfrom consideringtext asprocess? Readers of SEERwill particularlywelcome John Miles Foley's thoughtful unpickingof the far-from-neutralprocessesthroughwhich the South Slav oral epics variouslybecame textualized, from Karadzic to Parryand Lord, and of how decisions about what got collected/recorded, published and received shaped the nature and status of the printed collections. Arthur Hatto's 'Textology and epic texts from Siberia and beyond' surveysthe (varied)ways these multiple texts were written down, while Juha Pentikainen looks reflexivelyat his experiences of observing, video-recording, transcribingand translatingNanaj shamanicperformances.Karl Reichl's analysisof problems and strategiesin editing Turkicoral epics confrontsthe unavoidabledecisions about whichperformance to record, whether (and how) to notate phonetic, phonemic, prosodic and/or paralinguisticfeatures, and how far to indicate metrical, musical and macro-structuraldimensions. Any edition, he holds, 'transformsthe [living] event, and in doing so inevitablysilences the voice of the singer'(p. 123). Papers of more comparative interest include Minna Skafte Jensen's stimulatingre-examinationof how the Homeric epics might have got written, Joseph Harris on Old Norse, John Brockingtonand LauriHonko on Indian epics old and new, Dell Hymes on Native American ethnopoetics, AnnaLeena Siikalaon Cook Islandsepic tradition,and analysesof Africanepics by John WilliamJohnson, Jan Knappert and Dan Ben-Amos. Dwight F. Reynolds 's 'Creating an epic: from apprenticeship to publication' perceptively analyses the processes of textualizing an Arabic epic by a Nile Delta singer, both his experiencesof learningsome verbaland musicalperformancehimself and why he recorded ('created'?)one lengthy narrativetext rather than the usual performance units of short episodes. Overall the papers vary in length, substance and the degree to which they forward issues formulated by the editor, but between them illuminate a range of issues about textualization, performance and the still-heated questions of the definition and creation of 'epic'. The case studies are essential, but the jewel is Honko's introduction. His magisterial consideration of 'text as process and practice' highlights the current wave of interest in the multifacetedprocesses of textualization, both writtenand oral. He tellshow 'whatused to be an innocent objectof research, a verbal transcriptionof an orallyperformed song [... .] has been problematized from a variety of angles by questioning its boundaries, apparent fixity, 110 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 performative representativity, situational and cultural contextuality, cotextualand intertextualenvironment,discursivefunctionand ideologicalbasis [togetherwith] the collector'spurposiverole in the makingof the text and the editor's impact on the final form' (p. 3). His critical survey of approaches to text and performanceover the last century or so rangesfrom the paradigmof 'the text is king' to the current 'performanceis king' that in turn now due for problematizing.He tackleshead-on the ever-difficultquestion of how it is that while in one sense oral texts exist only in their episodic performances, often quite short and variable, a singer may neverthelessbe able to produce an integratedlong performanceeven when neverhaving done thisbefore. For this Honko utilizes his notion of 'mental text', a fertile (and controversial) concept applied in several of the papers here. It will doubtless attract much debate and scholarshipin the coming years. The forward-lookingcomparative work of Scandinavian literary scholars often seems relativelylittleknown in Britain.But for its theoreticalinsightsas much as its illustrativecases this volume should be in every library serving academic institutions engaged with literary and linguistic studies, anthropology , folklore, or cultural history. And for Slavonic and East European scholarsinterestedin recent approachesto epic, oralperformanceand literary text it will surelybecome obligatoryreading. Faculty ofSocialSciences RUTH FINNEGAN Open University Hawkesworth, Celia. Voices in theShadows.Women and Verbal Artin Serbiaand Bosnia. Central European University Press, Budapest, 2000. 28I pp. Illustrations.Maps. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?3I.95. HAWKESWORTH'S book containseight chapters,Conclusion, Bibliographyand Index. The author describesher project in the 'Introduction...

ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines—Speaking: Revised 1999

Foreign Language AnnalsVolume 33, Issue 1 p. 13-18 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines—Speaking: Revised 1999 Karen E. Breiner-Sanders, Karen E. Breiner-Sanders Georgetown University, Middlebury CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorPardee Lowe Jr., Pardee Lowe Jr. U.S. Department of DefenseSearch for more papers by this authorJohn Miles, John Miles Educational Testing ServiceSearch for more papers by this authorElvira Swender, Elvira Swender American Council on the Teaching of Foreign LanguagesSearch for more papers by this author Karen E. Breiner-Sanders, Karen E. Breiner-Sanders Georgetown University, Middlebury CollegeSearch for more papers by this authorPardee Lowe Jr., Pardee Lowe Jr. U.S. Department of DefenseSearch for more papers by this authorJohn Miles, John Miles Educational Testing ServiceSearch for more papers by this authorElvira Swender, Elvira Swender American Council on the Teaching of Foreign LanguagesSearch for more papers by this author First published: 31 December 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2000.tb00885.xCitations: 71AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume33, Issue1January 2000Pages 13-18 RelatedInformation

Bibliography of Classical Folklore Scholarship: Myths, Legends, and Popular Beliefs of Ancient Greece and Rome

Introduction Ancient Greek and Roman literature contains rich troves of and beliefs, many of which have counterparts in modern legends. For a number of reasons, today's are generally unaware that valuable primary source material from antiquity exists in English translation (for a wide selection of Greek and Latin literature in translation, see the Loeb Classical Library volumes in any good library). Classical scholars have published numerous of legends, myths and from antiquity, yet their work remains generally unknown to scholars. And for their part, most classicists have no idea that analogues of what they consider to be tales confined to the ancient Greco-Roman world still circulate today. Both disciplines would reap benefits if they renewed their acquaintance. (The estrangement between classics and since the 1920s is discussed in William Hansen's insightful essay of 1997, Mythology and Folktale Typology: Chronicle of a Failed Scholarly Revolution, in Journal of Folklore Research 34; see also the interview in Folklore Forum 29 [1998]:91-108, esp. 101-3). The lack of communication between classicists and is manifested in the dearth of classical examples in motif indexes and reflected in the lack of classical scholarship in the most up-to-date bibliographies. In Contemporary Legend: A Folklore Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1993), for example, Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith annotated 1,116 publications from ten countries and in eight languages, drawing together international legends from a very wide range of material ... in many different sorts of communication-modes and over a surprisingly long time-span. The compilers expressed surprise that analogues of :modern legends existed long ago as the sixteenth century (p. xvii). As a classical folklorist, I was dismayed to find only three entries representing legends from antiquity in the Contemporary Legend Bibliography. Those three--Raymond Himelick's 1946 note on the Poisoned Dress in ancient Greek legend, Bill Ellis's 1983 article on the ancient Roman roots of the Blood Libel legend, and my 1991 note on classical Greek parallels of a Gulf War legend--were published in journals, which accounts for their inclusion. When I contacted Bennett and Smith about classical folklore's regrettably low profile, they, encouraged me to gather this list of classical legend publications of interest to the folklore/contemporary legend community. This bibliography of classical scholarship is not intended to be exhaustive, of course, but it does demonstrate the wide variety of sources and commentaries available on ancient myth and lore. I hope that this list will encourage a new and creative dialogue between those who study legends and beliefs that were current in the ancient world and those who investigate recurrent legends of the present day. Traditionally, most ancient folk material has appeared in publications directed toward antiquarians. In 1994, however, John Miles Foley noted a burgeoning of scholarly activity in ancient Greek studies with direct relevance for folklorists in his review essay of six exemplary classical books for the Journal of American Folklore. A small group of scholars who define themselves as classical are making an effort to communicate with colleagues in by publishing their findings in folklore-oriented journals as well as classical venues. Classical goes by many aliases: literature, oral tales, folk tale, myth, novel, paradoxography, and recurrent, international, or migratory legends. The problem of clear terminology--whether contemporary can refer to tales that circulated in past societies--is unresolved. The difficulty of identifying a recognised field of classical legend is compounded by the negative perceptions of popular folklore among traditional classicists and ancient historians, many of whom would be surprised to find themselves cited here. …

14 or 40: The Singer or the Editor?

Book Review| October 01 1999 14 or 40: The Singer or the Editor? John Miles Foley John Miles Foley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (1999) 112 (446): 555–557. https://doi.org/10.2307/541494 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation John Miles Foley; 14 or 40: The Singer or the Editor?. Journal of American Folklore 1 January 1999; 112 (446): 555–557. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/541494 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Folklore Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 1999 The American Folklore Society1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.