_____________________________________________________________ Volume 23 October 2008 Number 2 _____________________________________________________________ Editor John Miles Foley Managing Editor Peter Ramey Associate Editor John Zemke Editorial Assistant IT Manager Sarah Zurhellen Mark Jarvis EDITORIAL BOARD Mark C. Amodio Joseph J. Duggan Vassar College Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Old and Middle English French, Spanish, comparative Patricia Arant Alan Dundes (✝) Brown University Univ. of Cal./Berkeley Russian Folklore Samuel Armistead Mark W. Edwards University of California/Davis Stanford University Hispanic, comparative Ancient Greek Richard Bauman Ruth Finnegan Indiana University Open University Folklore, Theory African, South Pacific Dan Ben-Amos Thomas Hale University of Pennsylvania Penn. State University Folklore African Mary Ellen Brown Lee Haring Indiana University Brooklyn College, CUNY Folklore, Balladry African Chogjin Joseph Harris Chinese Academy Harvard University of Social Sciences Old Norse Mongolian, Chinese Bridget Connelly Lauri Harvilahti University of Cal./Berkeley University of Helsinki Arabic Russian, Finnish, Altai Robert P. Creed Lauri Honko (✝) Univ. of Mass./Amherst Turku University Old English, Comparative Comparative Epic Robert Culley Dell Hymes McGill University University of Virginia Biblical Studies Native American, Linguistics Thomas DuBois Martin Jaffee University of Wisconsin Hebrew Bible Scandinavian Univ. of Washington EDITORIAL BOARD Minna Skafte Jensen Shelly Fenno Quinn Odense University Ohio State University Ancient Greek, Latin Japanese Werner Kelber Burton Raffel Rice University Univ. of Southwestern Biblical Studies Louisiana Translation Françoise Létoublon Karl Reichl Université Stendahl Universität Bonn Ancient Greek Turkic, Old and Middle English Victor Mair John Roberts University of Pennsylvania Ohio State University Chinese African-American Nada Miloševic-Djordjević Joel Sherzer University of Belgrade University of Texas/Austin South Slavic Native American, Anthropology Stephen Mitchell Dennis Tedlock Harvard University SUNY/Buffalo Scandinavian Native American Gregory Nagy J. Barre Toelken Harvard University Utah State University Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Folklore, Native American comparative Joseph Falaky Nagy Ronald J. Turner Univ. of Cal./Los Angeles Univ. of Missouri/Columbia Old Irish Storytelling Susan Niditch Andrew Wiget Amherst College University of New Mexico Hebrew Bible Native American Walter J. Ong (✝) St. Louis University (Emeritus) Hermeneutics of orality and literacy This page is intentionally left blank. Contents Editor’s Column . .183 Tammy Ho Lai-ming Reading Aloud in Dickens’ Novels . .185 Helen Gregory (Re)presenting Ourselves: Art, Identity, and Status in U. K. Poetry Slam . .201 Joan Gross Defendiendo la (Agri)Cultura: Reterritorializing Culture in the Puerto Rican Décima . .219 Outi Fingerroos Karelia: A Place of Memories and Utopias . .235 Katrin Rupp The Anxiety of Writing: A Reading of the Old English Journey Charm . .255 Andrea Fishman Thrênoi to Moirológia: Female Voices of Solitude, Resistance, and Solidarity. 267 Lorenzo Cherubini The Metamorphosis of an Oral Tradition: Dissonance in the Digital Stories of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada . .297 About the Authors . .315 This page is intentionally left blank. Editor’s Column In the current issue of Oral Tradition we offer seven articles that collectively represent the original vision of what the journal was established to do: namely, to illustrate the enormous wealth and innate diversity of oral traditions and thereby to suggest comparisons and contrasts outside the customary boundaries of specialty and discipline. The next three issues will trace the same path, with a miscellany (like the present number) in 24, i to be followed by collections on “sound effects” and the interface of humankind’s oldest and most widespread communications technology with Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Tammy Ho Lai-Ming opens the discussion with an examination of the evidence that Charles Dickens meant his novels to be read aloud, in other words to be performed. Given the great Victorian author’s use of oral traditional strategies such as folktale plotlines and the heightening of suspense through serialization, this article helps us understand the continuing influence of pre-Gutenberg dynamics. Helen Gregory then takes up the rich topic of poetry in the U. K., with special attention to particular poets and their melding of an international performance art with their identity as British artists. Next in order is a suggestive essay by Joan Gross, who discovers the roots of contemporary Puerto Rican poetic improvisation in a sixteenth-century Spanish form, and shows how poetic practice fosters “re-territorialization” of Puerto Rican culture by recalling its rural, agrarian origins. In an article written from the perspective of oral history, Outi Fingerroos explains how the lost homeland of Karelia (which spans parts of modern Finland and Russia) has been reconstructed in memory after war and resettlement foreshortened its history. Katrin Rupp explores what happens to an Anglo-Saxon charm, a practical and performance-based intervention, after it is committed to a manuscript, and how the scribe seems to have sensed the semiotic shift. In an essay that treats what may well be the most ubiquitous oral genre of all, Andrea Fishman looks at the oral tradition of lament by comparing examples from the ancient world (Euripides’ Suppliants) to contemporary field-recorded performances from Mani and Epiros. Finally, Lorenzo Cherubini considers the phenomenon of digital storytelling among the Aboriginal peoples of Canada as an extension of the oral tradition and a vehicle for political commentary. Along with the ongoing forum represented by our journal, which last year attracted almost 30,000 readers online, two related projects at the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition are underway. The first consists of an omnibus bibliography of more than 15,000 entries compiled from references cited over the 23 years of the journal’s existence; like Oral Tradition itself, this searchable facility will be available online and free of charge, hopefully by October 2009. Along with this data-base we are assembling an eBook of tagged and subtitled video excerpts from extensive interviews with Paolo Zedda, an oral poet and ethnomusicologist from Sardinia, who is in a unique position to explain the art of oral poetry from the double perspective of performer and scholar. The Lord and Parry Lecture that he delivered at the University of Missouri in late 2008 will be linked to this eBook, along with additional videos of performances of Sardinian mutetu. Let me end with a request. Please make a concerted effort to inform your colleagues of the existence of Oral Tradition in its free, online format (http://journal.oraltradition.org). The site was created in order to increase and diversify both readership and authorship, and we have already seen dramatic surges in both areas. Quite clearly, the study of the world’s oral traditions is an international enterprise, and we aim to serve all interested scholars, students, and institutions by promoting a truly democratic sharing of knowledge, art, and ideas. John Miles Foley Editor, Oral Tradition http://journal.oraltradition.org Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008): 185-199 Reading Aloud in Dickens’ Novels Tammy Ho Lai-ming Reading Aloud and Dickens’ Victorian England Reading aloud has a long history. In their introduction to A History of Reading in the West, Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier state (1999:40): “In the ancient world, in the Middle Ages and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sort of reading implicit in many texts was oralized (as was their actual reading). The ‘readers’ of those texts were listeners attentive to a reading voice. The text, addressed to the ear as much as to the eye, played on forms and formulas that adapted writing to the demands of oral performance.” Though Dickens’ nineteenth century is a time period outside those discussed by Cavallo and Chartier, ample evidence shows that reading aloud continued into the Victorian period. For example, the habit of performing a literary text orally in a Victorian family is well documented. In Daily Life in Victorian England, Sally Mitchell presents us with a seemingly prototypical family scene (1996:234): “reading aloud was customary during an evening at home. One person sat next to the only good lamp and read from a serialized novel or some other publication that would be interesting to both youngsters and adults.” Reading aloud was also a common phenomenon in the public domain in Victorian England. Dickens, with his publishers Chapman and Hall, successfully distributed literary reading materials to people from different social strata by reducing the price of novels through serialization. In Victorian Novels in Serial, Jerry Don Vann gives sole credit to Dickens’ Pickwick Papers for broadening the Victorian readership (1985:2): it “greatly enlarged the reading audience, who . could not manage the price of a published volume but could afford the monthly installments.” Serialization and the lower price of reading materials admitted a larger readership. Some of the new readers would have assembled and read a shared copy of the most recent issue in open spaces. Since the literacy level of this crowd was still low before school attendance was made compulsory in 1870 by the Education Act, many people from lower classes would listen