SOURCE: Pavlović, Milija N. “Oralist Vision and Neo-Traditionalist Revision: A Review Article.” Modern Language Review 86, no. 4 (October 1991): 867-84.

In the following essay, Pavlović debates the position taken by Joseph Duggan in his book-length study of the Cantar de mio Cid, which holds that the poem is an orally composed work dictated to a scribe around 1200.

The generally opposed and apparently irreconcilable views of the ‘neo-traditionalist’ and ‘(neo-)individualist’ schools that permeate much of the medieval epic's literary criticism have, over the last two decades or so, been especially polarized in the case of the Cantar de mio Cid (henceforth CMC).^{1, 2} Undoubtedly, the traditionalist camp's arguments are nowadays expressed most forcibly through oralist theory and methodology (despite the fact that oralist theories may serve either side, as Friedman rightly points out (p. 12)). On the other hand, many of those from within the individualist group, which believes the bulk of...