<Li> Jata - pāṭha, dhvaja - pāṭha and ghana - pāṭha are methods of recitation of a text and its oral transmission that developed after 5th century BCE, that is after the start of Buddhism and Jainism; these methods use more complicated rules of combination and were less used . </Li> <P> These extraordinary retention techniques guaranteed an accurate Śruti, fixed across the generations, not just in terms of unaltered word order but also in terms of sound . That these methods have been effective, is testified to by the preservation of the most ancient Indian religious text, the Ṛgveda (ca . 1500 BCE). </P> <P> The following overview draws upon Oral - Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography, (NY: Garland Publishing, 1985, 1986, 1989); additional material is summarized from the overlapping prefaces to the following volumes: The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology, (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1992); Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) and Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1987). in the work of the Serb scholar Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787--1864), a contemporary and friend of the Brothers Grimm . Vuk pursued similar projects of "salvage folklore" (similar to rescue archaeology) in the cognate traditions of the Southern Slavic regions which would later be gathered into Yugoslavia, and with the same admixture of romantic and nationalistic interests (he considered all those speaking the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect as Serbs). Somewhat later, but as part of the same scholarly enterprise of nationalist studies in folklore, the turcologist Vasily Radlov (1837--1918) would study the songs of the Kara - Kirghiz in what would later become the Soviet Union; Karadzic and Radloff would provide models for the work of Parry . </P> <P> In a separate development, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911--1980) would begin to focus attention on the ways that communicative media shape the nature of the content conveyed . He would serve as mentor to the Jesuit, Walter Ong (1912--2003), whose interests in cultural history, psychology and rhetoric would result in Orality and Literacy (Methuen, 1980) and the important but less - known Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Cornell, 1981) These two works articulated the contrasts between cultures defined by primary orality, writing, print, and the secondary orality of the electronic age . </P>

Why is american oral tradition important and how did it influence american literature