Teaching Oral Traditions
Editor(s): John Miles Foley
Pages: viii & 540 pp.
Published: 1998
ISBN: 9780873523714 (paperback)
ISBN: 9780873523707 (cloth)
Research is beginning to unearth the astounding wealth of oral traditions that have served as a vital cultural activity and verbal art for peoples throughout the world, from antiquity to the present. In this thirteenth volume of the MLA series Options for Teaching, forty-two scholar-teachers bring these discoveries and rediscoveries from the scholarly forum to the classroom.
The essays in this exciting field touch on more than a hundred traditions and draw from the methodologies of literary studies, folklore, anthropology, and linguistics. They are filled with vivid specifics. Among the subjects discussed are the unwritten roots of the Bible; the genesis and art of the Homeric poems; Native American traditions, like the Zuni "Deer Boy" tale and the Quechua proverb "Corn-Planting Day"; the performance of the African American toast "Stagolee"; Old English charms for afflictions; Mexican American corridos; the Travelling People of Scotland; African trickster tales; women's songs of mid-eleventh-century Andalusia; a Yiddish picaresque narrative; the fifth-century Indian Tale of an Anklet; South Slavic epics; the oral traditions behind Beowulf and behind the Canterbury Tales; the professional entertainers (jongleurs) of medieval France; and Icelandic sagas.
Teaching Oral Traditions demonstrates the importance of performance and challenges many current assumptions about the authority of the written word.
Table of Contents
TEACHING ORAL TRADITIONS
Contents
Introduction: An Audience for Oral Traditions
John Miles Foley
Part 1: Canon or Cornucopia?
The Impossibility of Canon
John Miles Foley
What Would a True Comparative Literature Look Like?
Lee Haring
The Performing Body on the Oral-Literate Continuum: Old English Poetry
Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe
Leading Proteus Captive: Editing and Translating Oral Tradition
Elizabeth C. Fine
Part 2: Critical Approaches
A Historical Glossary of Critical Approaches
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
Contemporary Critical Approaches and Studies in Oral Tradition
Mark C. Amodio
The Ethnography of Performance in the Study of Oral Traditions
Richard Bauman and Donald Braid
Ethnopoetics
Thomas DuBois
Traditional Referentiality: The Aesthetic Power of Oral Traditional Structures
Nancy Mason Bradbury
Part 3: Praxis: Oral Traditions in the Classroom
Living Traditions
Native American Traditions (North)
Barre Toelken
Native American Traditions (South)
John H. McDowell
African Oral Narrative Traditions
Donald J. Cosentino
African American Traditions
Sw. Anand Prahlad
General Hispanic Traditions
John Zemke
Mexican American Oral Traditions
María Herrera-Sobek
Jewish Oral Traditions
Judith S. Neulander
Indian Oral Traditions
R. Parthasarathy
Oral Performance and Orally Related Literature in China
Mark Bender
Oral and Vocal Traditions of Japan
Shelley Fenno Quinn
Arabic Traditions
Susan Slyomovics
South Slavic Traditions
Ronelle Alexander
British American Balladry
John D. Niles
Teaching the Folktale Tradition
Steven Swann Jones
Women's Expressive Forms
Marta Weigle
Storytelling: Practice and Movement
Carol L. Birch
Texts with Roots in Oral Tradition
The Hebrew Scriptures
Martin S. Jaffee
New Testament Texts: Rhetoric and Discourse
Werner H. Kelber
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey
Richard P. Martin
Beowulf
Alexandra H. Olsen
Chaucer
Carl Lindahl
The Middle English Romance and the Alliterative Tradition
Leslie Stratyner
Old French Literature
Evelyn Birge Vitz
The Icelandic Sagas
Joseph Harris
The Frame Tale East and West
Bonnie D. Irwin
Part 4: Courses, Readings, and Resources
The National Curriculum and the Teaching of Oral Traditions
Lynn C. Lewis and Lori Peterson
Multiculturalism and Oral Traditions
Beverly J. Stoeltje and Nancy Worthington
Using Oral Tradition in a Composition Classroom
William Bernard McCarthy
Course Descriptions and Syllabi
Lynn C. Lewis and Lori Peterson
Selected Audiovisual and Internet Resources
Anastasios Daskalopoulos
Works Cited
Index
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