Master Poets, Ritual Masters: The Art of Oral Composition Among the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This volume is a study in oral formulaic composition. It takes its lead from one of the great classics of oral composition, Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales (1960). Like Lord's study, this study is a study of oral formulae, but it seeks to define the notion of the formula in other contexts. An oral formula in this study consists of 'a group of words which is regularly employed under the conditions of struct parallelism to express a given essential idea'. This study looks at simple formulae based on the strict pairing of words and also a more complex formulae that are composed of several recognisable formula pairs.