The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition will sponsor a public lecture by A. B. Lord Fellow, Dr. Margaret Lyngdoh, “What the Returning Dead Want: Afterlife Narratives and Belief Worlds in West Khasi Hills,” Thursday, November 3, 2016 at 4:00 P.M. in Strickland Hall Room 115.
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The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition is pleased to announce the fifth recipient of the A. B. Lord Fellowship in Oral Tradition, Dr. Margaret Lyngdoh, who is a Junior Researcher at the Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu, Estonia, and will be in residence in Fall 2016.
On Thursday, October 13, 2016 Karl Reichl will offer the 31st Albert Lord and Milman Parry Lecture at the University of Missouri. The title of his talk, to be delivered at 7:00 pm in Room 7, John K. Hulston Hall, is “How to become an epic singer: ‘singer schools’ in Uzbek and other Turkic oral traditions”. The lecture is sponsored by the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition.
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Lee Haring describes himself as a literary critic, albeit one whose research concerns “a bunch of literature that nobody gets to see until I produce it. That is,” he explains, “I retrieve the materials that I work with which consist largely, these days, of what we call oral literature.” Over the course of his long and distinguished career, Haring has worked to translate and analyze the oral literature and traditions of the Indian Ocean Islands. Lee Haring is professor emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York…
On Tuesday, April 5, 2016 Lee Haring will offer the 30th Albert Lord and Milman Parry Lecture at the University of Missouri. The title of his talk, to be delivered at 7:00 pm in Room 7, John K. Hulston Hall, is “Translation in Folkloristics”. The lecture is sponsored by the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition.
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The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition will sponsor a public lecture by A. B. Lord Fellow, Dr. Xiulan Bao, “Mongolian Oral Traditions: History and the Status Quo,” Wednesday November 11, 2015 at 4:00 p.m. in Arts & Science Room 40A.
Dr. Xiulan Bao’s lecture has been rescheduled for Wednesday November 18, 2015 at 4:00 p.m. in Arts & Science Room 1.
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The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition is pleased to announce the fourth recipient of the A.B. Lord Fellowship in Oral Tradition, Dr. Xiulan Bao, who is Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnic Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and will be in residence in Fall 2015.
The home page of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition website features news stories, articles, and announcements of events that are of interest to individuals involved in the comparative field of oral tradition studies. What appears on this page at any given moment is a selection of items that are either time-dependent or of continuing importance of one kind or another. After their currency has expired, we will archive older items in the archive section of the website, so that they can serve as reference material on a permanent basis.
Among the Lyngngam and Nongtrai communities of the Khasi Hills, special funerary rituals associated with spirit propitiation, corpse reanimation, and endo-mortuary anthropophagy exist, and narratives about these practices have a special social function. This talk analyzes the storyworld of the Khasis, and it’s intersections with their social and religious reality. It presents a case study seen from the context of marginalization, the indigenous heritage, and conflicted intentions where belief becomes suggestive of a community’s need to come to terms with its own place alongside other ethnic identities. What comes out strongly, is the divisive function of folklore, as opposed to the romantic, unifying discourse of folklore studies as stressed in Western scholarship.
In his Singer of Tales Albert B. Lord gave a detailed account of the singers’ training, stressing that “an oral poem is not composed for but in performance.” In this lecture the most salient characteristics of the training process of the singers of tales among the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia and Siberia are discussed, highlighting some of the most significant similarities and differences to the South Slavic tradition as analyzed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. It is argued that the concept of composition in performance acquires a range of different meanings in the Uzbek and other Turkic oral traditions – in traditions that in some areas have continued to flourish into the present century.
Thanks to the generosity of their sons Nathan and Mark, together with the support of their families, the personal libraries of Albert Bates Lord and Mary Louise Lord have been donated to the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition and the University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries.
The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition now offers an online, searchable, free-of-charge bibliography that contains every book, article, film, or other item ever referenced in the journal Oral Tradition from its founding in 1986 onward, more than 15,000 entries in all.
This multimedia, hyperlinked eEdition of an oral performance provides an experience beyond the reach of a freestanding book or page. To a degree you can actually join the audience.
How to Read an Oral Poem starts from square one. Above all, it's intended as a reader- friendly invitation to think about oral poetry on its own terms. HROP attempts to speak to the nonspecialist in a straightforward, uncomplicated way. Plain talk, plain style, and a cornucopia of examples are its mainstays.
