Oral literature and the formula

Tracking the incidence of formulaic expressions in everyday speech: methods for classification and verification

Repetition, as a component of musical structure in popular songs, has long played an important part in 'popular common-sense' definitions, and criticisms, of the music. 'It's monotonous'; 'it's all the same'; 'it's predictable': such reactions have probably filtered down from the discussions of mass culture theorists. From this point of view, repetition (within a song) can be assimilated to the same category as what Adorno termed standardisation (as between songs). Of course, the significance of the role played by such techniques in the operations of the music industry - their efficacy in helping to define and hold markets, to channel types of consumption, to pre-form response and to make listening easy - can hardly be denied; it is, however, equally difficult to reduce the function of repetition simply to an analysis of the 'political economy' of popular music production and its ideological effects. Despite Adorno's critical assault (see Adorno 1941), despite later twists to the theory by, for instance, Fredric Jameson (1981), who argues that rather than being a negative quality of mass culture, repetition is simply a fundamental characteristic of all cultural production under contemporary capitalism, the question of repetition refuses to go away. Why do listeners find interest and pleasure in hearing the same thing over again? To be able to answer this question, which has troubled not only mass cultural theory but also traditional philosophical aesthetics, as well as more recent approaches such as psychoanalysis and information theory, would tell us more about the nature of popular music, and hence, mutatis mutandis, about music in general, than almost anything else. We must start by locating repetition within an overall theory of musical syntax. Repetition in musical syntax Analytically, we can posit two (ideal) structural types: the monad (the circular, the 'mythic', the blank space: most nearly approached by silence or by a single, unchanging, unending sound); and the infinite set* (the linear, the 'narrative', the replete process: most nearly * The term is taken from mathematical set theory.

‘Play it again Sam’: Some notes on the productivity of repetition in popular music

Formulaicity, frame semantics, and pragmatics in German binomial expressions

This comprehensive study of the Odyssey sees in meat and meat consumption a centre of gravitation for the interpretation of the poem. It aims to place the cultural practices represented in the poem against the background of the (agricultural) lived reality of the poem's audiences in the archaic age, and to align the themes of the adventures in Odysseus' wanderings with the events that transpire at Ithaca in the hero's absence. The criminal meat consumption of the suitors of Penelope in the civilised space of Ithaca is shown to resonate with the adventures of Odysseus and his companions in the pre-cultural worlds they are forced to visit. The book draws on folklore studies, the anthropology of hunting cultures, the comparative study of oral traditions, and the agricultural history of archaic and classical Greece. It will also be of interest to narratologists and students of folklore and Homeric poetics.

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The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey

Moving away from the verbal and thematic repetitions that have dominated Homeric studies and exploiting the insights of cognitive psychology, this highly innovative and accessible study focuses on the visual poetics of the Iliad as the narrative is envisioned by the poet and rendered visible It does so through a close analysis of the often-neglected 'Battle Books' They here emerge as a coherently visualized narrative sequence rather than as a random series of combats, and this approach reveals, for instance, the significance of Sarpedon's attack on the Achaean Wall and Patroclus' path to destruction In addition, Professor Strauss Clay suggests new ways of approaching ancient narratives: not only with one's ear, but also with one's eyes She further argues that the loci system of mnemonics, usually attributed to Simonides, is already fully exploited by the Iliad poet to keep track of his cast of characters and to organize his narrative

Homer's Trojan Theater: Space, Vision, and Memory in the IIiad

American magazine of international literature and culture

Oral literature and the formula

Citations

Tracking the incidence of formulaic expressions in everyday speech: methods for classification and verification

‘Play it again Sam’: Some notes on the productivity of repetition in popular music

Formulaicity, frame semantics, and pragmatics in German binomial expressions

The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey

Homer's Trojan Theater: Space, Vision, and Memory in the IIiad

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Oral Literature and the Formula

The Singer of Tales

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Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes