..., Greek +, Old Church Slavonic kp, and so on, as well as OE beran. Now, a major scholar of early English argues that there was a “tradition of Indo-Euro- pean oral-formulaic composition,” that it is recoverable, and that it “may provide a rewarding context for the critical interpretation...

..., and the university — all of which have valued writing at the expense of meaningful attention to oral works. Levine explores the serious political implications of effacing orality and proposes specific ways to incorporate orature into the institutions of world literature. Caroline Levine is professor...

... and auctoritas . A crucial prerequisite of this evolution was the shift in the presumed medium of European rhetorical poetics, from orality to writing to print. This argument has consequences for Habermas's general account of communicative rationality and is intended to suggest an alternate theoretical framework...

... on orally from performer to performer and from performer to audience, blackface minstrels sought to reassure the middle classes that they were emulating more sophisticated European musical traditions. What both the covers and the contents of post-1843 blackface sheet music reveal is that these minstrels...

...: it is not impossible that Johnson’s imagina- tion was better able to represent and cope with the shattering actuality in which Dr. Dodd preached his farewell sermon than the unfortunate Dr. Dodd himself was at the time.3 And thirdly, historically, the oral and the written and the printed word had been...

...John Webster Spargo H. Munro Chadwick and N. Kershaw Chadwick. Three volumes. Volume I, The Ancient Literatures of Europe (1932), pp. xx + 672; Volume II, Russian Oral Literature, Yugoslav Oral Poetry, Early Indian Literature, Early Hebrew Literature (1936), pp. xvii + 783; Volume III, Oral...

.... Olsen) contained this statement : The more closely we read our sagas and conduct research into them, the clearer it becomes that they are works of art, that an artist’s quill inscribed them on vellum and that behind him was no unified oral tradition enshrining a completely formed saga...

... which have been spoiled by oral tradition? The first trail to be followed in answering such questions is to consider what is known about the sources of the saga.6o The genealogical tree of Harald Hairfair conforms to the tables in the beginning of Ari’s ZsZendingubo’k, and although...

... be weighed. First, there may be a textual depend- ence of ThN on Es; if so, the former would derive in a purely lit- erary way from the written text of the latter. Secondly, ThN may go back to the same oral tradition that came to be recorded in the Es text. Thirdly, one may suppose...

... REVIEWS The pagan heroic ethos persists in this obviously Christian document mainly because its aristocratic heritage preserved the poetry’s oral and fbrniulaic nature. Niles firmly maintains that Bvoululf is an oral poem. He wisely avoids the rnany technical discussions of this subject...

..., urban scene of anonymous crowds and of recent song production as alienated labor, divided among uncomprehending composers, performers, and auditors. While Ritson depicts oral per- formance in an unflattering light, many of his contemporaries see the scene as a function of commercial print’s...

... transformations of orality into literacy and vice versa” (13). Equally wide-ranging and multidimensional is Tautz’s inclusive concept of literature: “ Translating the World locates literary production in languages that encompass all registers, are full of stylistic inflections, of translations (e.g., from other...

... case. One theme does not make a tradition. But oral traditionists do not rely on the occurrence of the singer theme alone. They can also argue that both the Beowulfian and Homeric narratives are built of formulas confined to verse lines and parts of lines, that neither poem “plays...

....” He makes the valuable point that Fornrit editors, especially Sigurtjur Nordal, are extremely guarded in their statements about the form in which oral tradition was introduced into the sagas, and he goes on to emphasize, in support of Baetke’s more recent strictures on some of the underlying...

... with a description of the periods in early Icelandic history, emphasizing those factors which inspired the writing of the sagas. Following Nordal et al., Hallberg devotes his most distinguished chapter to countering the argu- ments of the “free prose” (oral) school. He then examines particular aspects...

... have a documentary character as well. Roger Chartier has argued that the vaunted culture of print was shadowed by a residual “culture of recitation” that kept the printed book in the service of orality and sociability well into the eighteenth century; in Don Quixote, for example, a novella...

... of Milman Parry, Albert Lord, F. P. Magoun, and Stephen Nichols, Jr. He agrees with Brian Dutton that Berceo uses, in cuaderna via, formulaic composition as much as any epic minstrel. But Perry goes further, pointing out the differences between for- mulaic usage in oral poetry of the folk...

.... Desire has been identified by Leo Bersani as the disruptive threat to realistic fiction, which must therefore develop strategies of containment.13Jacob embodies a prin- ciple of limitless desire, yet all of his desire is channeled into one oral register, the craving for sweetness. If Jacob...

... ethnology, the others being orality, alterity, and unconsciousness. For the ethnologist the primitive society is “a timeless land . . . displayed before the observer’s eye.”f)One specific form of this myth of atempo- rality-imputing forgetfulness to native peoples-foists the responsi- bility...

...) that has contributed most to the neglect of the Middle English romances. To be kind, the verse of the romances in England, with oral formulas metamorphosed into ge- neric cliches, belongs to a “plain style” tradition, which developed more or less naturally from its roots in oral tradition...