Oral Tradition Volume 9, Number 1March 1994
Editor's Column
The critic J. Hillis Miller has written of the “terror or dread readers may experience when they confront a text which seems irreducibly strange, inexplicable, perhaps even mad” (1985:20). Literary study in the 1980s, he writes, is beset by profound disagreements over whether the “ground” of literature is to be found in social forces, metaphysical presuppositions, individual psychology, or language itself. For the future of criticism, he counsels “slow reading,” uncovering assumptions, and continuing interrogation of “the very idea of the ground.” Since the West began confronting the irreducibly strange yet compelling power of the word in African verbal art (Calame-Griaule 1963, Peek 1981), terror and dread have never been far from the surface. A classic means of addressing one’s terror is mimesis, as my undergraduate aesthetics professor told us: imitation for the sake of mastery springs from a compulsion to order. In the light of Michael Taussig’s recent book (1993) exploring the complicated relations of mimesis and alterity, mimesis can be seen to underlie all nine articles in this special issue. All in their various ways attempt to create a correspondence between the artistic human communication of African peoples and a written representation, which may be a set of propositions and correlates, a translation and summary, or an analysis that will imitate and celebrate African oral traditions while making them reasonable and explicable. The issue opens a perspective on contemporary folkloristic issues; this introduction interrogates the ground for scholarly and critical mimesis, assuming that oral and written literature both grow in such a ground.
Read more - Introduction: The Search for Grounds in African Oral Tradition
Lee Haring, Guest Editor
