Since it was first brought into modern critical consciousness by Milman Parry over half a century ago, the recognition of a distinctly oral mode of verbal artistry has sponsored a broadening interdisciplinary movement that now encompasses oral "literary" traditions from many parts of the world. In the course of such a development it was no doubt inevitable that the categorical distinction between "oral" and "literate," axiomatic in the early stages of the evolution of oral theory, should increasingly fall into jeopardy. For on the most obvious level, the existence of some kind of text--whether a medieval codex or a cassette tape--is a precondition for literary study on any but the most limited of scales; one might well argue that poems and narratives so recorded have been made literate at least to the degree that literate consciousness has participated in the process of their preservation and dissemination. Yet when one turns to Middle English literature, one is confronted with a greater complexity of orality-literacy interactions, figured in literary works themselves composed in writing yet indebted to oral traditions that underlie and inform them on many levels. Defining the parameters of the relationship between this burgeoning, vernacular chirographic tradition and its oral progenitor will comprise a central task for many scholars working in this branch of Middle English studies.--Page 636.Ward Parks (Louisiana State University) combines training in the Old English and Homeric Greek traditions with an expertise in modern critical theory, as exemplified in essays published in Anglo-Saxon England, Neophilologus, and elsewhere. He is presently working on a monograph on "flyting and fighting" in traditional poetry and a source study of Blind Harry
