What is the Parry-Lord Doctrine?

In the 1960s, the American scholar Loder created a new field of comparative oral tradition studies, revealing the creative power of oral epic tradition and establishing a rigorous analytical method of oral poetics. Loder's research shows that the study of epic is no longer synonymous with European classics, but has become a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of comparative oral traditions, and that the new doctrines of performance theory and ethnopoetics that emerged after the 1970s have made full use of oral traditions, absorbed the results of contemporary linguistics, anthropology and folklore, and carried out theoretical and methodological construction, which has greatly improved the academic status of epic research and made it a rich and creative field of study. status, making it a field rich in innovation. Taking the representative works of scholars such as Parry, Lord, Nagy and Foley as clues, and the history of European folklore, the history of oral heritage research and the centennial history of American folklore as reference systems, this paper elaborates the basic concepts, research methods and the process of disciplinary formation of oral poetics, determines its position in the history of Western folklore, and explains its relevance to the study of Chinese folklore.

Keywords: oral tradition, epic, program

Epic poetry belongs to the category of narrative poetry. Epic is an ancient literary style with epoch-making significance in the history of human culture. Epic poetry in the long process of inheritance into a large number of myths, legends, stories, songs and proverbs and so on. An epic is a treasure trove of folk literature and an encyclopedia for understanding a nation. Epic poems had a long history as oral literature before they were recorded in writing and appeared as literary forms. The process of their development in literary form can be verified from documentary sources; their origin as oral literature goes back to the prehistoric times of mankind.

The epic is a type of literature prevalent in the world. Sumerian epics date back to about 2000 B.C., Babylonian and Greek epics appeared in 1000-400 B.C., and a large number of epics appeared in medieval and modern European literary history. It is generally accepted that the discussion of epic poetry and the nature of epic poetry in literary history began in Europe. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Heras discussed epic poetry, but it was not until the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the 16th century that people began to theorize about epic poetry. European classical studies have accumulated a profound academic tradition in the field of epic research. 18th century European Romanticism movement opened up a boom in the collection and study of folk epics, promoting the exploration of the origin, circulation and creation of epics, etc. In the mid-19th century the rise of European folklore, epics, as a style of folklore, entered the field of vision of modern scholars once again, and opened a new era of epic research in terms of methodology. A new era of epic research was opened in terms of methodology. In strong contrast, Chinese epic has never been given due attention and has not been given a place in the history of world literature. This is a great pity.

In the 20th century, the study of world epic entered a new historical stage. Inspired by historical research and the increasing rigor of analytical procedures, people thought dispassionately about the large amount of information that had been accumulated. The British classicist Bowler pioneered the comparative study of oral and written poetry, redefined the heroic epic, and expounded its literary significance in depth.In the 1960s, the American scholar Loder created a new field of comparative oral tradition research, revealed the creative power of the oral epic tradition, and established a set of analytical methods for a rigorous oral poetics. Loder's research shows that the study of epic is no longer synonymous with European classics, but has become a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of comparative oral traditions. new doctrines such as performance theory and ethnopoetics, which appeared one after another after the 1970s, make full use of the living materials of oral traditions, absorb the results of contemporary linguistics, anthropology and folklore, and carry out theoretical and methodological construction, thus greatly improving the academic status of oral epic research and making it an important part of the oral tradition and a source of knowledge. This has greatly enhanced the academic status of oral epic research and made it a field rich in innovation.

In strong contrast to China's rich epic tradition, our research started late, theoretical discussions are still weak, and international academic influence is not significant. The construction of the discipline of Chinese epic research is a systematic project, which includes the integration of the research team, the establishment of a database in line with modern academic norms, the gradual improvement of theories and methodologies regulating academic research, and the concretization and systematization of research directions. From the point of view of the existing conditions and the work that has already begun, the study of Chinese epic is developing in a healthy direction with a very broad prospect.

This paper takes the representative works of contemporary European and American scholars on epic as a clue, takes the history of European folklore, the history of oral heritage research and the 100-year history of American folklore as a frame of reference, elaborates on the basic concepts, research methodology and process of formation of the discipline of oral poetics, determines its position in the history of Western folklore, and explains its connection with the study of Chinese folklore. As far as the study of epic poetry is concerned, the West has accumulated a rich academic tradition since Aristotle in Ancient Greece, while the large-scale development of epic poetry research in China is only half a century old. We have studied epics, but this kind of research is not yet a disciplinary self-consciousness in the sense of epics, which is manifested in the fact that most scholars do not study oral epics as orally inherited folklore events, but rather from the classical dogma, and academic research is confused with national consciousness and state ideology, and the study of writers' literature is confused with the study of oral inheritance. The crux of the problem lies in the fact that today's academics are internationalized, while our understanding of the world is one-sided, and our scholars often dare to borrow theoretical concepts from a book just by reading it. Therefore, a systematic study by one school of thought may be beneficial to the academic community. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive introduction and research on the methodology and theories of folklore, which are now internationally accepted, to establish a new conceptual system and effectively utilize the new methods for standardized academic research. China is a country where oral epics are very rich, and the theory of oral poetics has a broad prospect for development here.

First of all, we should understand the major premise of Parry-Lord's doctrine, that is, its academic background. This question begins with classics, ethnography and linguistics since the 19th century. [1]

Classicism took the "Homeric problem" as a touchstone, which is a fundamental problem of Parry Lord's doctrine of oral poetry. However, since ancient times the interpretation of this question has been limited to mythological explanations, and the discovery of oral culture by the Romantics and nationalists in Europe in the nineteenth century made the "Homeric question" a question of "oral tradition". Since then, the Homeric question has also become a question of how the ancient classics are perceived. The sacredness of the Homeric epics has made it customary to think of them a priori as the original work of some sage. European classicism has been constantly plagued over the past 200 years by questions such as: was the legend written in the time of Homer? How to explain the inconsistency of the epics? How were such long epics created and preserved without the help of writing? What to make of the myths and legends about the creation of epics? How to explain the phenomenon of cultural deposition in the epics in different eras, such as the problem of dialects and archaic languages. Research has shown that whether or not there was writing in Homer's time has nothing to do with the "Homeric problem"; moving the authors of the Homeric epics forward to a pre-written oral age is certainly progress, but there is still a belief in a fixed text that hinders people's thinking. The idea of collective folk creation spawned the idea of multiple authorship, short songs, and the search for archetypes ...... None of this touches the essence of oral poetry. 1st century AD: Josephus raised questions from the inconsistency of the narratives of the Homeric epics. Thereafter, for about 1700 years, there was no controversy, except for wars and plagues, and in 1715 Abbe d'Aubignac pointed out that "there are practically no writings signed by Homer, who did not write. If he had not written anything, Homer would not exist at all." In 1795 Fredrich Wolf stirred up a nineteenth-century controversy between Analysts and Unitarians, a dispute between one Homer and many. One of the two sides of the debate was the so-called Analysts, who concocted a "synthetic theory" of the epic. This was led by Karl Lachmann, who in 1816 and 1836 argued that Homer's poetry had been composed, processed, and edited by different poets and editors over the course of centuries, and that this was the result of linguistic and narrative deficiencies. On the other side of the polemic is the so-called Unitarian school. This faction has no flag bearer. They are in the minority and are under constant attack. However, the attackers' arguments are not well thought out. They argued that the epics were the lifelong work of Homer alone. The result of the argument discerning faction won. Parry encounters the final act of this long argument, taking the Homeric question as the starting point for his own scholarship and inheriting some of the views and methods of the discerning school.

Linguistics is the main source of the methodology of Parry-Lord's doctrine. The German classical philological study of the Homeric genre had inspired Parry a lot. Most of the later followers of the doctrine of oral programming got their start from modern linguistics. Modern linguistics is the focal point of humanistic studies, describing linguistics, especially structuralism, which considers language as a structure; researchers in oral poetics emphasize: the study of the inner structure and function of oral poetry, using language and text as the primary realities of experience. The aim of historical linguistics: to establish a continuum of meaning within a tradition, contributing to the search for a linguistic *** homogeneous poetic tradition. Foley believed that philology (historical linguistics) provided the methodology for Parry and Lorde. in 1860 Ellentt and Duntzer noted the relationship between metre and chapter. Witte (1912) spoke of the morphology of words. A. Meillet specialized in oral creation.[2] Parry was inspired by his work. [2] Parry was influenced by him and began to study the genre of epic poetry. Parry's doctrine drew on the work of all the above scholars, and many of his ideas were drawn from the treatises of his predecessors. Parry drew on ethnography in order to refine his doctrine. Parry and Lord traveled to Naslav in the 1930s to investigate and test their theoretical hypotheses from the site of oral traditions.

Ethnography provided the doctrine of oral poetry with a directly observable poetic reality beyond the text; the empirical study of classical studies proved to be able to draw on anthropological approaches to comparative studies between different traditions. Radlov: in the study of Central Asian epic poetry touches on performance of oral poetry, improvisation, variations of the story, typical scenes, kitsch, a comparative approach to intercomparison of living epic traditions with the Homeric epics. Murko: His ethnographic report proves the Yugoslav oral epic tradition as an analog of the Homeric epics. Among the ethnographers Parry looked up to were Radlov: in his field report on Central Asian epics in 1885, he pointed out that variants in performance were never regarded as new creations. He studied singers and proved his point by proposing the so-called commonplaces. Krauss: In 1908, he made a field study in Yugoslavia, and confirmed that singers used "commonplaces" to compose and performed from memory. Gennep discussed the same phenomenon in 1909. Gesmann discovered the "composition scheme" in oral composition, in which the narrator possesses a narrative structure to fill in the lines of the poem. Murko, who investigated the oral epics and singers of Yugoslavia with modern ethnographic methods, had the greatest influence on Parry and determined the leap in Parry's learning: traditional Homer - oral Homer. [3]

In the end, Parry laid down his own doctrine, which changed the conventional wisdom in classical scholarship and made it possible to see the oral tradition of the Homeric epics in terms of their texts. Parry studied the texts of the Homeric epics as we have them today, and he traveled to Yugoslavia to verify them with living oral traditions in the present. Lorde followed in his teacher's footsteps by verifying the doctrine with comparative oral tradition. Loder investigated the singers and, after years of research, proved his teacher's doctrine, completing this demystifying study with the publication of The Story Singer in 1960, a landmark work that Foley made the "bible" of oral literature.

Since the 1930s, the Parilaudian doctrine has been challenged from a variety of academic fields. The reliability of the doctrine has been questioned: the theory is too mechanical, extracting and studying only fragments of epic poetry; it is not certain that the theory can be applied to other styles of folklore; and is the theory specific to all the epics of the world (and is epic poetry a universal style)? If so, the theory has not yet been tested worldwide; without the premise of "improvisation," the theory of oral programs has no legs to stand on. Therefore, it is still only a theory, and perhaps it will never be proven, much less to everyone's satisfaction.

Contrary to the objections of its opponents, oral program theory has been applied to the study of more than 100 of the world's language traditions, and it has moved beyond the theoretical stage.

Parry's concept of oral poetry provides a key to the Homeric problem. Parry believes that an understanding of the nature of oral poetry is an understanding of the nature of Homeric poetry. Parry argues that the solution to the Homeric problem must begin with the study of the inner workings of oral poetry and the acquisition of knowledge that distinguishes it from written literature (lore against literature). Parry's scholarship demonstrates the meticulous scientific attitude of the humanities researcher: the observation of phenomena, the establishment of hypotheses, the testing of hypotheses by experimentation, and the identification or revision of hypothesized conclusions. The main issues Parry addresses are: the extent to which singers rely on tradition, the stability and variability of oral poetry, the ways in which oral poetry is passed on, the material of epics, and the connection of epics with historical events.[4] The collection of Parry's material is based on the following principles. [4] The collection of Parry's material: the natural environment of the epic, i.e., the level of performance: the length of the epic, the pauses, the characteristics of the composition, the songs that demand to be sung in a particularly natural way. Parry's collection of epic songs from the culture of Yugoslav song focuses on the importance that the collector attaches to performance - authentic performance that is given by the audience in the culture of song. The Parry Collection: a collection of Yugoslav epic texts, they are texts preserved in the form of recordings and in the form of codices, they are a record of the laboratories of the living epic tradition in Yugoslavia. The science of the Pari doctrine derives from the quality of the arguments.

Pari's definition of oral poetry. Parry studied how oral poets learn and create epic poetry, and the process of this actual existence. He sees oral poetry as living organisms, constructed in terms of programs and themes, and he emphasizes every performance of a song, i.e., the creation of poetry in performance, where the oral poet belongs to the tradition and at the same time is a creative individual artist. Parry examines a unique process: oral song learning, oral composition, and oral transmission, which almost overlap and are different aspects of the same process. There was no fixed text for this process. Parry's study became a prime example of what would become 20th century folklore.

Parry's scholarly contributions began with his discovery of and argument for a "traditional Homer". Through linguistic analysis of the Homeric texts, Parry discovered traditional narrative units such as program, meter, thrift, and interlineation. Secondly, he discovers the "oral Homer," the oral tradition behind the Homeric texts. He argues that the extent of Homer's reliance on traditional forms of word expression suggests that he was an oral poet; furthermore, Parry pioneered the method of analogical validation, and the living epic of Yugoslavia provided him with the reality of the oral poetic experience.

As a student of Parry's, Lorde's contribution is no less important than that of his teacher. Studying the oral tradition of narrative song, Loder discarded the terms "epic," "heroic poetry," "folk epic," "national epic," "popular poetry," "poetry of the masses," "poetry of the people," and "poetry of the people. "folk epic," "folk epic," "national epic," "popular," or "primitive. He believed that the battle of terminology was at stake.[5] Lorde was an oral poet. [5] Loder was a founding father of oral poetics, and The Story Singer is an original work in the study of oral poetry that answers the question of what oral transmission is, its structure and function, and its inner workings, based on rigorous first-hand field data and a structuralist ****temporal view. The Story Singer begins "This is a book about Homer, our story singer. In a larger sense, he represents all storytellers from ancient times to the present." Contemporary Yugoslavian singer "Avdor is the Homer of our time." Lorde's words reveal the fact of comparative oral transmission. Parallel comparisons of different peoples and traditions are at the same time comparative historical studies through the ages.

The comparative method of oral poetics is first of all the analogical method of parallel study. Through the description of the process of oral poetry creation and transmission, the basic points for comparison are identified: speech patterns, meter, syntax, stylistic patterns, programs and themes, and story patterns. For example, Lorde's comparison of story patterns of return songs is made at the following points: absence, robbery, return, revenge, and wedding. There are also historical-comparative methods of impact studies, such as Nagy's comparison of the homologous metre of Homeric epics and Indian Sanskrit poetry, in which he utilizes a comparative Indo-European approach to linguistic reconstruction. [6] He establishes a hermeneutical model of the trinity of performance, composition, and circulation, which elucidates the evolutionary patterns of Homeric formation and the process of Homeric textualization through a comparison of the living epic tradition in India with that of the Homeric epics. [7] G.S. Kirk proposed the hypothesis of four stages in the life cycle of oral traditions - initiation, creation, repetitive production and decline. [8] While the above studies focused mainly on ****ual comparisons, later scholars pursued the uniqueness of traditions beyond ****uality. Each oral poetic tradition has its own qualities and actively incorporates those qualities into the critical model of that tradition; it includes essential features of language, metrical and other metrical demands, narrative features, mythological and specific historical content. Emphasis is placed on the exact characteristics of each text: oral, derived from the oral, recorded in singing, memorized, transcribed, the history of the circulation of the transcripts and the circumstances in which they were collected, and so on. [9]

The doctrine of oral poetry has the following important concepts[10]:

Composition in performance, which is the central proposition of oral poetics. To understand oral poetry in performance, one must begin with fieldwork. Fieldwork reflects the positivism that characterizes the study of oral poetry; it is the process of collecting evidence about the performance of living oral poetry, which consists of the reality of oral poetry as recorded, observed, and studied by the researcher in the present, on the spot, in the field, and as described by the researcher. We call this process fieldwork. Fieldwork is a major feature of Parry and Lord's scholarship. They emphasized the sacredness of mining the Western literary heritage in the oral tradition of literature. Loder spent years of data collection in the Balkans, and Loder's experience in fieldwork was no less than that of those who entered folklore from an anthropological perspective. In response to the idea that one should seek out archetypes, Lorde refutes, "I doubt that it is possible to find archetypes in stories, songs, or epics, for we have to take into account that every performance of an art form in oral tradition, whether story or epic, has variations for every singer." One can note Lorde's view of the complex relationship between ethnographic fieldwork and the populace that is the object of this work, "Everything in the poem belongs to the populace collectively, but the poem itself, the program that emerges from the particular singing, belongs to the singer. All the elements, all of them, are traditional. But when a great singer sits in front of an audience, his music, his facial expressions, his particular version of the poem, belongs to him at the moment."

The fieldwork was done primarily using the folkloristic method of ***temporal analysis. The terms ****temporal and ephemeral come from linguistics. It is one of the theoretical studies of the Prague School.Linguistics in the 19th and 20th centuries was divided into historical and non-historical approaches, the former aiming at the historical reconstruction of the Indo-European family of languages and the latter for the comparative study of the current state of languages. For the study of oral poetry in singing, fieldwork requires such ****emporal analysis aimed at describing the actual system of the tradition. The diachronic analysis is needed when the study enters into the deep organizing principles of the tradition, i.e., the reality of the continuity of the culture. The method of linguistic reconstruction can explain many aspects of language in extant traditions that are otherwise unclear. Ephemeral and ****-temporal analyses, both of which can complement each other.

Analysis of the ****temporal nature of poetry in the living oral tradition shows that composition and performance are two aspects of the same process that are at different degrees of change. It is impossible to observe such a reality at the level of the epic text alone. Lorde argues that oral poetry is not composed to be performed, but is accomplished in the form of a performance.

The notion of circulation, a term that corresponds to "creation in performance," can only be observed through time as a feature of the circulation of oral tradition, which interacts with both creation and performance. The mode of circulation can be centripetal or centrifugal.

Theme, in its most practical definition: the theme is the basic unit of content. Themes are associated with socio-cultural patterns. The themes of Homeric epics do not fit into the themes of Indian epics. Different styles of folklore have different modes of analyzing thematics. Program is a relatively fixed term which is governed by the themes of traditional oral poetry. The relation of program to form is equivalent to the relation of theme to content. The assumed premise of this provision is that form and content are conceptually overlapping. Parry's definition of a program: a program has the same pattern of steps, expresses basic meaning, and is a group of words that are used regularly. Programs are as varied a spectacle as language itself.

Frugality, this was Parry's discovery: the language of the Homeric poems is a free form of expression that has the same rhythmic value, expresses the same meaning, and can be substituted for one another. This law of frugality can only be observed at the level of performance.

Tradition and innovation, oral tradition comes to life in performance, and every performance here and now offers sequential opportunities for innovation, not shifted by man all the time, and any such innovation is explicitly recognized in the tradition. Unity and Organicity, in the terms of oral poetics, the unity and organic wholeness of the Homeric epics is the result of the historical development of the singing tradition, not the result of the influence of a creator who overrides the tradition. It is a very common mistake to attribute the originator of the epic to a particular cultural hero. The modern concept of author is a word that is personal and emphasizes individuality.

Author and text, in the terms of oral poetics, the question of authorship is determined by the authority of the singing and the text, by the stability between countless performances. The notion of text derives from the proposition of creation in performance. The main aspect of oral poetics is performance. In the model of the hermeneutic trinity of creation, performance, and circulation, the key element is performance. Without performance the oral tradition is not oral, without performance the tradition is not the same tradition, without performance then ideas about Homer lose their integrity, and not only that, but our knowledge of the ancient classics will not be complete.

The Parry-Lord doctrine is a theory that has carried forward the study of oral tradition in the twentieth century. The Parry-Lord doctrine itself is interdisciplinary. Parry and Lord came from Harvard, the cradle of American folklore. The two of them represent the third and fourth generations of Harvard folklorists respectively. Folklore provided a historical climate for Parry's and Lord's research that supported Lord in proposing and shaping his doctoral dissertation, The Story Singer, which later became a seminal work of oral literature. Four disciplines at Harvard formed the organic whole of Lorde's academic career: classics, Slavic literature, comparative literature, and what would become folklore. [11] The Parry Lord doctrine was well articulated in the folklore textbooks that prevailed throughout the United States in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The Parry-Lord doctrine is closely related to the tradition of American folklore, which from 1888 onward formed two schools of thought: the folklore of the humanities and the folklore of anthropology, with the former controlling the universities and the latter occupying the American Folklore Society. Anthropological folklorists divided oral traditions into various styles and specialized in them, with the scope of the folklore of civilized societies, mainly the linguistic traditions of Indo-European-speaking peoples. They were represented by Child, Kittredge, Thompson, Hart, and Taylor. Anthroposophical folklorists tried to take evolutionary theory to the origin of folklore events. Inheriting the tenor of European folklore, they emphasized the study of story texts, dividing them into types and further matriarchal or other elements. They emphasized the study of text collection, annotation, and transmission and circulation, and were strongly influenced by the Finnish historical-geographical approach. Parry and Lord studied the process of creation of oral transmission, they respected the important value of folklore and ethnography, and emphasized fieldwork. Of course there are those who still think of them as mere literary folklorists.

The doctrine of Parry Lord is historically important in the study of oral tradition. 18th and 19th century "grand theories": European Romantic nationalism, the doctrine of cultural evolution and the myth of the sun. 20th century "mechanistic" origins: Finnish folklore and ethnography. The study of the origins of the "mechanistic theory" of the 20th century: the Finnish historical-geographical approach, the territorial-decadal hypothesis, etc. The study of textual patterns: the epic law, the theory of oral programs and the morphological approach. Structuralist and hermeneutic approaches, psychoanalytic doctrines, ethnopoetics, performance theory, etc. The Parry-Lorde doctrine is a folkloristic theory developed in the 20th century in the wider context of the scholarly paradigms of Russian formalism and structuralism. The purpose of the study: the question of what and how it works for a folkloric event replaces the previous question of detecting its origins. [12] In the academic context of oral heritage studies, the representatives of oral poetics, who study textual patterns as a means of memory and a reference point for tradition; they, along with Propp's morphological approach and Orlick's epic law, belong to the study of textual patterns. [13] Oral poetics inherited from Arne and Thompson's Finnish historical-geographical approach on the one hand, and pioneered ethnopoetics and performance theory on the other.

Modern Chinese scholars such as Wen Yiduo, Zhu Ziqing, Gu Jiegang, Zhong Jingwen, and Chen Yincheng, etc., who studied the fubi Xing of the Book of Songs from the perspective of folk songs from the 1930s onward, dealt with the problems of improvisational verbal composition and oral stylistic forms of oral poetry, but did not form a methodology, nor did they receive any serious summary by their descendants. The connection between the ancient classics such as the Shijing and the Chushi and the oral tradition has been brought to the attention of late scholars. Of course, commentators have not yet had the experience of fieldwork on living oral traditions. in 1974, the Chinese American scholar Wang Jingxian published his doctoral dissertation on the study of the Poetry Scriptures, which was the first time that Parry's doctrine was applied to the study of Chinese literature; in the 1980s, Yang Chengzhi wrote a special article introducing Lorde's The Storytelling Singer to Chinese folklorists; in the late 1980s, European scholars applied the methodology to the study of Chinese rap literature, such as the Yangzhou In 1997, the translation of oral poetics began: Foley's "The Parry-Lord Doctrine: The Theory and Methods of Oral Composition" and Lorde's "The Story Singer" have been translated into Chinese and will be published soon, and the theory has already been noticed and cited by researchers. 1998, "Poetic Study of Oral Literature" entered the youth program of China's National Social Science Foundation. 2000, "Poetic Study of Oral Literature" entered the youth program of China's National Social Science Foundation. In 2000, based on the model of Harvard University's Milman Parry Oral Literature Database, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences established a major program to support the construction of "China's Minority Oral Literature Database".