ABSTRACT
Aristotle posited the origins of tragedy in the recasting of epic materials while disparaging the epics as a less coherent form, beginning the long process of misinterpreting epics and oral practices through the retrospective application of literate priorities. Writers such as Eric Havelock argued that such interpretations fail to understand the epic systems as organizations of information and memory, as well as their later recasting in contrasting Roman forms such as the Aeneid. As the Greek epics were the context for the following tragedies, the mixed literate operations of medieval works such as The Canterbury Tales were for drama after 1576 in England. Other narratives such as the Chinese sixteenth-century novel Xi Yi Ji (Journey to the West) and the traditional Lakota story cycles transcribed by James R. Walker suggest that even the formalized texts of the Greek epics are unlikely to reflect many aspects of their actual oral form, as literate interpretive habits reimagine, and perhaps misapprehend, the past.
