American Ethnopoetics: A New Critical Dimension

TL;DR: For instance, this paper argued that the artistry of any single performance is made possible by the existence of definable literary traditions, such as The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Abstract: Ethnopoetics is the study of preliterate societies' modes of discourse, the formal complexity ofwhich requires that they be understood as literature. In the twenty years of its existence ethnopoetics has demonstrated that material collected by linguists, folklorists, and anthropologists inattentive to aesthetic components or functions reveals—when carefully analyzed—patterns of superb literary artistry. Because the central focus of this discipline is work oral in its original form, ethnopoetic critics do not ignore the uniqueness of individual performances. But these critics assume that the artistry of any single performance is made possible by the existence of definable literary traditions. The art of a single work, as with Western European literature, simultaneously embodies and modifies an aesthetic system. Ethnopoetics thus radically opposes modern celebrants of \"primitive\" art, artists such as Picasso and critics such as Roger Fry, who have praised aboriginal creations as accordant with Modernist aesthetics while implicitly or explicitly denying the capability of \"primitives\" to create significant artistic traditions. As in linguistics, which operates on the assumption that no language can be identified as \"primitive,\" the fundamental presupposition of ethnopoetics is that there is no such thing as \"primitive art.\" The importance of ethnopoetic ambitions to recover artistic system is perhaps best illustrated by Western European civilization's supreme ethnopoetic texts, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The most famous work of classical scholarship in this century is Milman Parry's study of Homeric formulae, which first appeared more than half a century ago. Parry's