放牛班的课堂

Dear Colleagues

In the current issue of Oral Tradition we offer ten articles that collectively fulfill the original vision of what the journal was established to do: namely, to illustrate the enormous wealth and innate diversity of oral traditions worldwide and throughout history, and thereby to suggest comparisons and contrasts outside the customary boundaries of specialty and discipline.

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Editor, Oral Tradition

The Southern Sardinian Tradition of the Mutetu Longu: A Functional Analysis


by Paulu Zedda



The mutetu longu is a traditional genre of Sardinian oral poetry that is still performed in the southern part of Sardinia. According to this tradition, three or more improvisers challenge one another on stage before an audience, singing stanzas accompanied by a guttural male chorus or by guitar. The first part of this article provides a description of the whole phenomenon, including some historical background and a brief explanation of the social context, followed by a discussion of the complexity of the metrical structure that strongly characterizes it. The latter section analyzes the way the inner mechanisms work, evaluating the functional reasons behind the mutetu ’s particular metrical structure (which reaches high levels of formal complexity and redundancy), the relevance of memory in the elaboration of the poetic text, and the flow of time and its perception.

Dialogues in Rhyme: The Performative Contexts of Cretan Mantinádes

by Venla Sykäri



In Crete, the strong local identity has helped a communicative form of oral poetry, the mantináde, survive to the present day. Emblematic of the performance and composition of these short rhyming couplets is a multilayered dialogism—performative, referential, and textual—that also pervades modern arenas (poems are very popular in the media and even exchanged as text messages). In order to understand how dialogism is embedded in the tradition, this article presents mantinádes as traditionally sung and recited in a wide range of performative discourses.

放牛班的课堂

Oral Tradition Volume 24, Number 1March 2009
Table of Contents | Editor's Column | About the Authors

Table of Contents

The Southern Sardinian Tradition of the Mutetu Longu: A Functional Analysis by Paulu Zedda

The mutetu longu is a traditional genre of Sardinian oral poetry that is still performed in the southern part of Sardinia. According to this tradition, three or more improvisers challenge one another on stage before an audience, singing stanzas accompanied by a guttural male chorus or by guitar. The first part of this article provides a description of the whole phenomenon, including some historical background and a brief explanation of the social context, followed by a discussion of the complexity of the metrical structure that strongly characterizes it. The latter section analyzes the way the inner mechanisms work, evaluating the functional reasons behind the mutetu’s particular metrical structure (which reaches high levels of formal complexity and redundancy), the relevance of memory in the elaboration of the poetic text, and the flow of time and its perception.

Presentation Formulas in South Slavic Epic Song by David F. Elmer

South Slavic epic singers make frequent use of direct address to the listener in order to draw attention to important characters or events. These “presentation formulas” fulfill a variety of important discursive functions. Analogously to certain cinematographic techniques (the cuts of montage, panning, or zooming-in of the camera), they shift the listener’s mental vision from one point of reference to another. They can also articulate the structure of a song and create sophisticated aesthetic effects of absence and presence.

The Art of Dueling with Words: Toward a New Understanding of Verbal Duels across the World by Valentina Pagliai

A common view of verbal duels is that they are exchanges of insults between young males, and thus a cathartic expression of aggression. Through an examination of verbal duels worldwide, this article demonstrates that this view is overly restrictive. The heterogeneity of forms of verbal duels includes genres performed by both men and women and by children, adults, or the elderly, as well as duels that are staged or improvised, more or less structured, and so on. At the same time, a closer analysis of insults is necessary to understand why, when insults are exchanged, they cannot be immediately connected to aggression. In particular, a distinction must be made between insults and “outrageous speech,” between the target and the recipient of insults, and between verbal duels and ritual insults.

Dialogues in Rhyme: The Performative Contexts of Cretan Mantinádes by Venla Sykäri

In Crete, the strong local identity has helped a communicative form of oral poetry, the mantináde, survive to the present day. Emblematic of the performance and composition of these short rhyming couplets is a multilayered dialogism—performative, referential, and textual—that also pervades modern arenas (poems are very popular in the media and even exchanged as text messages). In order to understand how dialogism is embedded in the tradition, this article presents mantinádes as traditionally sung and recited in a wide range of performative discourses.

Orality and Agency: Reading an Irish Autobiography from the Great Blasket Island by John Eastlake

The Islandman (1934) by Tomás Ó Criomhthain is the first autobiography to be published by a member of the Irish-speaking community on the Great Blasket Island. This book, whose author was a member of a largely oral community and a participant in many communal oral traditions, has often been read as the work of a passive informant rather than that of an active author. By examining the critical attitudes towards Ó Criomhthain and his work, particularly those that associate orality with passivity and communalism and deny textual authority to members of largely oral communities, this article identifies a crucial tension between opposing readings of this text: reading Ó Criomhthain as a representative type and reading Ó Criomhthain as an author. By developing the latter reading of the text, the reader may recognize the agency of the author-subject of a collaborative autobiography that has its roots in a life lived largely through orality.

Paradigms of Social Aesthetics in Themne Oral Performance by Amadu Wurie Khan

Based on a long-term study from 1987 to the present and incorporating storytelling apprenticeship, ethnographic fieldwork, and (largely informal) interviews, this paper discusses the dynamic nature of oral art as manifested through Themne storytellers’ efforts to vary the oral performance. It explores the relationship between multimedia resources, both intrinsic and external to the performance environment, as well as artistic variation and social aesthetics, along with the audiences’ appreciation and interpretation of oral performances. It argues that the impulse toward social aesthetics is responsible for the oral artists’ deployment of multimedia resources and their varying of oral narratives during storytelling. Specifically, it examines how sociability, the physical setting of performance, and belief systems or worldview function as paradigms of social aesthetics, focusing on their influence on artistic variation and creativity among the Themne of Sierra Leone.

The Creation of Basque Oral Poetry by Four American Bertsolaris by Asier Barandiaran

This study analyzes the improvisational styles of four Basque bertsolaris who live and perform in the United States, examining a broad range of elements, from the formal aspects of the stanzas to the rhetoric and speech employed by American bertsolaritza. Bearing in mind several rhetorical criteria, I evaluate the quality of this Basque oral genre as performed by these oral poets in a place and context so far removed from the place and context where this phenomenon was born.

Are We “Misreading” Paul? Oral Phenomena and their Implication for the Exegesis of Paul’s Letters by Sam Tsang

For a substantial period, orality studies were primarily restricted to non-biblical literature. Ever since the application of orality studies to Gospel criticism, however, this approach has moved from a peripheral to a central place in Gospel studies. However, its application to the letters of Paul has remained quite limited. This article investigates some of the interpretive possibilities that can enhance current methods of reading Paul, taking into account the implications of orality studies in order to hear Paul’s message from the perspective of the original audience.

Storytellers of Children’s Literature and their Ideological Construction of the Audience by Bruno Alonso, Marta Morgade, David Poveda

This paper examines the beliefs and informal theories about their audiences held by a group of twelve Spanish storytellers who perform for children. The interviews were collected as part of a larger study focusing on children’s literature and socialization in urban informal learning contexts. Four aspects or dimensions of storytellers’ ideologies are examined: the role of age as a structuring dimension, the role of children’s upbringing and background in their construction as audiences, their definition of an ideal storytelling context, and the role of audience participation. The study focuses specifically on the effect that contact with the formal educational system can have on the formation of storytellers’ beliefs and finds an especially visible relationship in the first and second dimensions.

Performative Loci of the Imperial Edicts in Nara Japan, 749-70 by Ross Bender

The Japanese Empress Kōken/Shōtoku (r. 749-70) governed not merely from a static setting, a throne in the palace at Nara, but by delivering her edicts in a wide variety of performative loci: in Buddhist temples, mansions of the nobility, and temporary palaces during royal progresses around the realm. This paper analyzes the texts, settings, and audiences of edicts, arguing that eighth-century Japan is an important venue for the study of transitions from orality to literacy.