Program in the Study of Oral Tradition

The ever-expanding study (including the recording) of oral tradition—arguably a scholarly discipline as old as our earliest written records, and as new as ground-breaking analysis of the most recent popular legend—focuses on:

•the complexities of verbal folklore and its transmission;

•the diversity of oral traditional genres (such as epic, ballad, and folktale);

•the relationships between spoken language and written language, and between oral tradition and other media (such as written literature and film);

•the oral-traditional basis of mythology;

•theories of orality past and present, from Plato to Derrida;

•and the pervasive and persistent significance of stylized verbal communication in culture and society.

The approaches of scholars in the Study of Oral Tradition are fundamentally interdisciplinary and comparative, and the critical issues emerging in the field promise to build even more bridges among the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Arts. The Program in the Study of Oral Tradition at UCLA and its Faculty seek to encourage this vital area of humanistic and interdisciplinary scholarship by sponsoring courses and conferences relevant to the field.