Title: Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature
Abstract: Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Literature. By John D. Niles. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. 280, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth) Young scholars of folklore planning to undertake academic careers would do well to look to this book for a useful example of it possible to ply folkloristic craft while contributing to firmly entrenched academic disciplines that offer employment even lean times. In Homo Narrans Niles, currently a Professor of English at University of Wisconsin, Madison, deftly fortifies his reputation as a triple threat, engaging literary criticism, folkloristics, and medieval studies (specifically, study of Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon culture). The thesis of work, consisting to a significant degree of previously published material, that study of living storytellers and their traditions (such as Niles's work on and with Duncan Williamson and other Scottish storytellers and singers) not only has intrinsic worth, but also can give Anglo-Saxonists as well as students of other early and medieval literatures unique insights into old texts that are indebted to, even if not actually derived from, oral tradition. As Niles readily admits, this hardly news to folklorists or even to literary scholars familiar with epochal work of Parry, Lord, and their successors. The thesis, however, argued here so enthusiastically and elegantly that reader, no matter jaded, likely to emerge reinvigorated by that enthusiasm, and with confidence restored a battery of tried and true ideas to apply and test next time Beowulf, Homer, or some other venerable classic of supposedly literary tradition comes into view. The first chapter, Making Connections, argues for intellectual value of alternating Scottish travellers with Anglo-Saxon poets, oral tradition as studied by folklorists with written heritage left by medieval cultures, and poetics (identifying principles underlying stylized verbal communication) with anthropology (determining social functions of such communication). My aim, Niles proclaims, is to ask what form oral narrative takes, and what work it does world, and how (30). The following chapter, Somatic Communication, speaks of stories as fundamental to human condition-as providing the houses we live in (64)-and of storytelling terms of performance, ritual, and relation. Chapter Three, as Social Praxis, turns its attention primarily to an analysis of what purposes Old English poem Beowulf, as an act of storytelling, might have served for its Anglo-Saxon audience and/or readership. The functions adumbrated include ludic, sapiential, normative, constitutive, socially cohesive, and adaptive. The ambiguously titled fourth chapter, Oral Poetry Acts deals primarily with act of committing some semblance of oral tradition to writing, and with cultural reasons that probably lay behind Anglo-Saxon scribes' acting oral, or performers' acting literary. Chapter Five, Beowulf as Ritualized Discourse, continues along these lines, making case for a relatively late date (the tenth century) for composition and textualization of poem. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot