Oral Tradition Volume 11, Number 2October 1996
Editor's Column
The first item of business for this Editor’s Column is in fact business. With the present issue Slavica Publishers moves from its longstanding temenos in Columbus, Ohio to the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Indiana University, Bloomington. The most immediate consequence of this change in venue is the change in address for subscriptions, back issues, and other matters relating to publication. For these purposes, please write to: Slavica Publishers, 2611 East 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47408-2603. The web site address remains the same (http://www.slavica.com), but the new telephone number is 812-856-4186 (fax 812-856-4187).
All editorial correspondence—including manuscripts submitted, books for review, inquiries, and so forth—should continue to be sent to the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri- Columbia. Our contact numbers and addresses appear at the end of this column.
The second item of business is a consequence of the first. After more than ten years of rewarding collaboration, I take this opportunity to thank the former president of Slavica Publishers, Professor Charles E. Gribble of Ohio State University, for his creative and generous support of our journal. Oral Tradition became a reality in 1986, due largely to his timely agreement to help us get started, and Professor Gribble’s staunch support through the years has enabled our publications program to develop in ways that could not be foreseen at the outset. It is modest enough recompense for more than a decade of such faithful stewardship, but I would like to dedicate this issue of Oral Tradition to him in gratitude for his enormous efforts on its behalf.
Indeed, the present issue may perhaps stand as a worthy tribute to Chuck Gribble in one particular way. Eleven years ago the journal was founded to provide a forum for comparative exchange, a kind of “pituitary gland” to help organize a cross-disciplinary discourse that often suffered from reinventing the wheel. In these first ten annual volumes of OT, an electronic index to which will soon be available at the web site maintained by the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition (www.missouri.edu/~csottime), we have tried to bring scholars from disparate areas into an unprecedented, productive dialogue. Issue 11, ii illustrates this editorial policy, treating a rich variety of oral traditions and performances, from ballads to Shakespeare to Japanese storytelling, medieval English poetry, Finnish narrative, and African American rap music. Our editorial premise is clear: the best chance for understanding any single tradition lies in a realistic grasp of the plurality and heterogeneity of oral traditions. OT has been and will remain committed to this premise.
Future issues will address the complexities of oral traditions in various ways. Issue 12, i will focus on South Asian women’s traditions, opening up an understudied area to closer inspection. Similarly, number 13, i will feature Native American traditions, concentrating on the challenge of cotranslation by a native speaker and an outside scholar. In between these two special issues, as well as afterward, we will be presenting typically miscellaneous collections that will include articles on Russian, Mongolian, Tibetan, Old Norse, ancient Greek, Chinese, and Latvian traditions, for example, as well as a major overview of Jewish folk literature from ancient times to the present, an update to the ongoing bibliography of oral-formulaic theory, a cluster of essays on oral Torah, and an analysis of electronic communication in the context of orality and literacy.
Let me close by emphasizing our wish to broaden the ongoing discussion by whatever means are available. Thus we actively solicit your manuscripts, in any and all fields. We also plan an enlargement of our web site to include not only the annotated bibliography of oral-formulaic theory (already in place) and the index of volumes 1-10 of OT, but also titles and abstracts for future contents. Let us know how we can better serve your academic needs.
John Miles Foley, Editor
