ABSTRACT
Attempting to study oral traditions from before the advent of sound recording technologies presents an obvious challenge. Having no direct access to the utterances of past orators, scholars of oral traditions resolve instead to study “the spoken word, in so far as it can be retrieved from written sources” (A. Fox Oral and Literate 52). The study of oral tradition necessarily becomes, then, the study of its “trace”—a sign (in this case, a text) that “presents itself as the mark of an anterior presence, origin, master” (Spivak “Preface” xv). Written sources provide scholars with traces of a host of everyday orations, from prayers and bedtime stories to plays, workers’ rhymes, and political speeches.
