Memory on Canvas: Commedia dell’Arte as a Model for Homeric Performance
Timothy W. Boyd
Although, thanks to many years of research and comparative scholarship, we have a more complete understanding of the making of…
Remix: Pathways of the Mind
Morgan E. Grey
This brief piece discusses John Foley’s recent work on The Pathways Project, which explores the relationship between oral tradition and…
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Communication Then and Now
Bruce E. Shields
This essay examines the preaching of Jesus in relation to research into communication in primarily oral cultures, and then turns…
The Old English Verse Line in Translation: Steps Toward a New Theory of Page Presentation
Derek Updegraff
This short essay examines the practice of printing translations of Old English poems in the predictable displays of full- and…
“A Misnomer of Sizeable Proportions”: SMS and Oral Tradition
Sarah Zurhellen
As a relatively recent communication technology, SMS—more colloquially known as text-messaging—has received a good deal of attention both in popular…
Rethinking Individual Authorship: Robert Burns, Oral Tradition, and the Twenty-First Century
Ruth Knezevich
The songs of late-eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns provide a rich case study of literature that challenges existing notions of…
Beowulf’s Singers of Tales as Hyperlinks
Peter Ramey
The scenes of oral poetic performance that occur throughout Beowulf have received an array of critical responses. This essay builds…
Prisons, Performance Arena, and Occupational Humor
Claire Schmidt
Correctional officers use occupational humor to communicate complex meanings. These messages are often essential to occupational and institutional well-being, yet…
Heroic Register, Oral Tradition, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
Rebecca Richardson Mouser
By employing an oral traditional approach to the text, this essay investigates how the use of alliteration and speech-acts in…
The Metonym: Rhetoric and Oral Tradition at the Crossroads
Catherine Quick
This article explores the intersection between scholarship of rhetoric and oral tradition through the trope of the metonym. Metonymic referentiality…
Sean-nós i gConamara / Sean-nós in Connemara: Digital Media and Oral Tradition in the West of Ireland
Holly Hobbs
In the west of Ireland, Irish-speaking regions called gaeltachts are home to a long-standing but understudied form of unaccompanied and…
Intentionally Adrift: What The Pathways Project Can Teach Us About Teaching and Learning
Bonnie D. Irwin
Recent generations of college students, brought up in a digital world of short bytes of information and nonlinear patterns of…
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Changing Traditions and Village Development in Kalotaszentkirály
Wayne Kraft
The continuity of village traditions depends on the stability and cohesion of village communities. Since the opening of Transylvania after…
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The Role of Memory in the Tradition Represented by the Deuteronomic History and the Book of Chronicles
Raymond F. Person, Jr.
Albert Lord and John Miles Foley have discussed the role of memory and multiformity in oral traditions. Their work helps…
Foreword
Joseph Falaky Nagy
Vernacular Phrasal Display: Towards the Definition of a Form
Adam Brooke Davis
This essay discusses a genre of folksay, one paradoxically widely collected but little studied, lacking even a satisfactory definition or…
“Stricken to Silence”: Authoritative Response, Homeric Irony, and the Peril of a Missed Language Cue
Andrew E. Porter
The formula “Thus he spoke, but they all were stricken to silence” (ὣς ἔφαθ’, οἳ δ’ ἄρα πάντες ἀκὴν ἐγένοντο…
Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon J. Ortiz: Pathways to the Tradition
Dave Henderson
Both Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon J. Ortiz have retold the story of a 1952 murder by two Pueblo brothers,…
Variation within Limits: An Evolutionary Approach to the Structure and Dynamics of the Multiform
Michael D. C. Drout
This essay draws upon research in evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology to explain the evolution and stability of the oral-traditional…
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Oral Tradition and Sappho
R. Scott Garner
Through an exploration of Sappho’s verse-structuring tendencies and repeated phraseology, the current essay demonstrates that Sappho’s stanzaic poetry was enabled…
Toward a Ritual Poetics: Dream of the Rood as a Case Study
Heather Maring
The notion of “ritual poetics” explored in this essay weds the findings of John Miles Foley’s immanent art to ritual…
Cicero the Homerist
Carolyn Higbie
Cicero clearly knew both the texts of Homer and the Alexandrian scholarship on those texts, but he chose not to…
“A Swarm in July”: Beekeeping Perspectives on the Old English Wið Ymbe Charm
Kayla M. Miller, Lori Ann Garner
This exploration of an Old English charm against a swarm of bees (wið ymbe) augments and complements prior work on…
Matija Murko, Wilhelm Radloff, and Oral Epic Studies
Aaron Phillip Tate
Commonly regarded as pioneers in the documentation of oral epic singing, Wilhelm Radloff and Matija Murko were personally acquainted and…
Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey
Steve Reece
How would a folklorist, if miraculously transported to an eighth-century BCE social gathering in Ionia where Homer was performing a…
Juxtaposing Cogadh Gáedel re Gallaib with Orkneyinga saga
Thomas A. DuBois
The fields of Scandinavian studies and Celtic studies have reveled in the rich trove of vernacular literature preserved in medieval…
