John Miles Foley Quotes

American literary scholar (1947-2012)

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John Miles Foley (January 22, 1947 – May 3, 2012) was a scholar of comparative oral tradition, particularly medieval and Old English literature, Homer and Serbian epic.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

We know now that cultures are not oral or literate; rather they employ a menu or spectrum of communicative strategies, some of them associated with texts, some with voices, and some with both.

To put it most simply, the oral traditional idiom persisted because—even in a written incarnation—it offered the only avenue to the immanent poetic tradition, the invisible but ever-present aesthetic context for all of the poems.