Reviews for History of the American people

The average rating for History of the American people based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-22 00:00:00 John Kerr One of the schools to which I applied for graduate study back in the 1980s was the University of Missouri at Columbia. Reading this book makes me regret not having gone, as I would have had the famous teacher, John Miles Foley, for at least one and maybe more than one class. I have a deep interest in the Homeric works, and Foley goes a long way to broadening the sense of what oral poetry is and what oral poetry does. Parry and Lord who famously studied the Muslim epics of Yugoslavia, and found in them proof of the "formulaic" way of speaking we see in the Homeric poems, did a great service, but they were limited in their approach, and their pronouncements have led lots of people to conclude that oral poetry is very much as Homer presents it, but Foley shows how, even in Yugoslavia, the world of oral poetry is much wider than these particular epics, no matter how great those works are.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-10-07 00:00:00 Linda A Myers i took john foley's course as a senior in college, and it was a radical experience for me-- totally transforming the way i view the process of poetry, the process of sharing poetry, the mystery of oral communication, and art of trying to preserve such mystery with the written word.