Subject: Literary Criticism

INTAN MAULINA

12.0073/7112220073

1. What is Oral Literature in English?

The term "oral literature" is sometimes used interchangeably with "folklore," but it usually has a broader focus. The expression is self-contradictory: literature, strictly speaking, is that which is written down; but the term is used here to emphasize the imaginative creativity and conventional structures that mark oral discourse too. Oral literature shares with written literature the use of heightened language in various genres (narrative, lyric, epic, etc), but it is set apart by being actualized only in performance and by the fact that the performer can (and sometimes is obliged to) improvise so that oral text constitutes an event.

Literature's Life Through Performance

Oral literature may be composed in performance; transmitted orally over generations, like many Scottish and Irish ballads that have been brought to Canada; or written down specifically for oral performance. The process of transmission itself (often in recent years, to collecting folklorists and oral historians) shows that oral literature has not been replaced by the ubiquitousness of books and the electronic media though it persists alongide them as secondary orality. Indeed, whenever a ghost story is told around a campfire, whenever a protest song or a lullabye is sung, whenever a riddle, tongue twister, counting rhyme, shaggy-dog story or knock-knock joke is shared, or fables and proverbs told, oral literature lives in performance.

The attitudes of scholars and the literate public toward oral literature were largely shaped by the 19th-century Romantic movement. William Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798), claimed to have found in the oral discourse of unlettered rustic people the source of literary spontaneity, sincerity and integral unity. At about the same time a rise in nationalism, with its emphasis on local origins, encouraged the study of "popular antiquities" - ie, the oral tradition of history and narrative. Writers in Canada followed the trend, transforming tales, legends, proverbs and anecdotes into written form, and sometimes

incorporating tale-tellers, such as T.C. HALIBURTON 's Sam Slick, into their written work. The techniques were adopted by Susanna MOODIE, who, in ROUGHING IT IN THE BUSH (1852), tells a life history that is also a "liar's tale": a hyperbolic account of the hellish life in the new land to counter the land company's lie that Canada was a new Eden. Other examples of borrowing - of techniques or of actual tales (canoe songs, tales of encounters with the devil, etc) - appear in 19th-century Canadian written literature, and the use of dialect further emphasizes their oral underpinnings. At the end of the century the so-called Confederation poets (Mair, Roberts, Crawford, Johnson, Carman, Lampman) reworked extensively such sources as traditional ghost stories and native myth.

2. What is Oral tradition?

Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and tradition transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants. In this way, it is possible for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other knowledges across generations without a writing system.

A narrower definition of oral tradition is sometimes appropriate. Sociologists might also emphasize a requirement that the material is held in common by a group of people, over several generations, and might distinguish oral tradition from testimony or oral history. In a general sense, "oral tradition" refers to the transmissison of cultural material through vocal utterance, and was long held to be a key descriptor of folklore (a criterion no longer rigidly held by all folklorists). As an academic discipline, it refers both to a set of objects of study and a method by which they are studied—the method may be called variously "oral traditional theory", "the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition" and the "Parry-Lord theory" (after two of its founders; see below) The study of oral tradition is distinct from the academic discipline of oral history, which is the recording of personal memories and histories of those who experienced historical eras or events. It is also distinct from the study of orality, which can be defined as thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population.

3. Example of Oral Literature

A Brief Summary of “The Odyssey”

Ten years after the fall of Troy, the victorious Greek hero Odysseus has still not returned to his native Ithaka. A band of rowdy suitors, believing Odysseus to be dead, has overrun his palace, courting his faithfulthough weakeningwife, Penelope, and going through� � his stock of food. With permission from Zeus, the goddess Athena, Odysseus' greatest immortal ally, appears in disguise and urges Odysseus' son Telemakhos to seek news of his

father at Pylos and Sparta. However, the suitors, led by Antinoos, plan to ambush him upon his return.

As Telemakhos tracks Odysseus' trail through stories from his old comrades-in-arms, Athena arranges for the release of Odysseus from the island of the beautiful goddess Kalypso, whose prisoner and lover he has been for the last eight years. Odysseus sets sail on a makeshift raft, but the sea god Poseidon, whose wrath Odysseus incurred earlier in his adventures by blinding Poseidon's son, the Kyklops Polyphemos, conjures up a storm. With Athena's help, Odysseus reaches the Phaiakians. Their princess, Nausikaa, who has a crush on the handsome warrior, opens the palace to the stranger. Odysseus withholds his identity for as long as he can until finally, at the Phaiakians' request, he tells the story of his adventures.

Odysseus relates how, following the Trojan War, his men suffered more losses at the hands of the Kikones, then were nearly tempted to stay on the island of the drug-addled Lotos Eaters. Next, the Kyklops Polyphemos devoured many of Odysseus' men before an ingenious plan of Odysseus' allowed the rest to escapebut not before Odysseus revealed his name to� Polyphemos and thus started his personal war with Poseidon. The wind god Ailos then provided Odysseus with a bag of winds to aid his return home, but the crew greedily opened the bag and sent the ship to the land of the giant, man-eating Laistrygonians, where they again barely escaped.

On their next stop, the goddess Kirke tricked Odysseus' men and turned them into pigs. With the help of the god Hermes, Odysseus defied her spell and metamorphosed the pigs back into men. They stayed on her island for a year in the lap of luxury, with Odysseus as her lover, before moving on and resisting the temptations of the seductive and dangerous Seirenes, navigating between the sea monster Skylla and the whirlpools of Kharybdis, and plumbing the depths of Hades to receive a prophecy from the blind seer Teiresias. Resting on the island of Helios, Odysseus' men disobeyed his orders not to touch the oxen. At sea, Zeus punished them and all but Odysseus died in a storm. It was then that Odysseus reached Kalypso's island.

Odysseus finishes his story, and the Phaiakians hospitably give him gifts and ferry him home on a ship. Athena disguises Odysseus as a beggar and instructs him to seek out his old swineherd, Eumaios; she will recall Telemakhos from his own travels. With Athena's help, Telemakhos avoids the suitors' ambush and reunites with his father, who reveals his identity only to his son and swineherd. He devises a plan to overthrow the suitors with their help.

In disguise as a beggar, Odysseus investigates his palace. The suitors and a few of his old servants generally treat him rudely as Odysseus sizes up the loyalty of Penelope and his other servants. Penelope, who notes the resemblance between the beggar and her presumably dead husband, proposes a contest: she will, at last, marry the suitor who can string Odysseus' great bow and shoot an arrow through a dozen axeheads.

Only Odysseus can pull off the feat. Bow in hand, he shoots and kills the suitor Antinoos and reveals his identity. With Telemakhos, Eumaios, and his goatherd Philoitios at his side, Odysseus leads the massacre of the suitors, aided only at the end by Athena. Odysseus lovingly reunites with Penelope, his knowledge of their bed that he built the proof that overcomes her skepticism that he is an impostor. Outside of town, Odysseus visits his ailing father, Laertes, but an army of the suitors' relatives quickly finds them. With the encouragement of a disguised Athena, Laertes strikes down the ringleader, Antinoos' father. Before the battle can progress any further, Athena, on command from Zeus, orders peace between the two sides.