This volume represents the sixth in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. The present work comprises a collection of essays that explore the tensions and controversies that arise as a society moves from an oral to literate culture. Part 1 deals with both Homeric and other forms of epic; part 2 explores different ways in which texts and writing were manipulated for political ends. Part 3 and 4 deals with the controversies surrounding the adoption of writing as the accepted mode of communication; whereas some segments of society began to privilege writing over oral communication, others continued to maintain that the latter was superior. Part 4 looks at the oral elements of Athenian Law.
Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers -- ethical, practical and conceptual -- in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.
Orality was the backbone of ancient Greek culture throughout its different periods. This volume will serve to deepen the reader’s knowledge of how Greek texts circulated during the Roman Empire. The studies included here approach the subject from both a literary and a sociocultural point of view, illuminating the interconnections between literary and social practices. Topics considered include epigraphy, the rhetoric of transmitting the texts, language and speech, performance, theatre, narrative representation, material culture, and the interaction of different cultures. Since orality is a widespread phenomenon in the Greek-speaking world of the Roman Empire, this book draws the reader’s attention to under-researched texts and inscriptions.
Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.
This Palgrave Pivot strives to recount and understand Indigenous Law, as set within a remote community in northern Australia. It pays close attention to the realpolitik and high-level political functioning of Indigenous Laws, which inspires a discussion of how this Law models the relational, influences governance and emplaces people in an ordered kincentric lifeworld. The book argues that Indigenous Law can be examined for the ways in which it is a deliberate, stabilizing and powerful force to maintain communal order in relation to Country, a counter framing to popular and ‘soft law or soft power asset’ visions of such Laws often held in the national and international imaginary. It is the latter which too often renders this knowledge esoteric and relinquishes it to a category of lore or folklore. This is an open access book.
This field guide to oral history in Latin America addresses methodological, ethical, and interpretive issues arising from the region’s unique milieu. With careful consideration of the challenges of working in Latin America – including those of language, culture, performance, translation, and political instability – David Carey Jr. provides guidance for those conducting oral history research in the postcolonial world. In regions such as Latin America, where nations that have been subjected to violent colonial and neocolonial forces continue to strive for just and peaceful societies, decolonizing research and analysis is imperative. Carey deploys case studies and examples in ways that will resonate with anyone who is interested in oral history.
"This is the first book in the English language devoted to the study of the work of Mozambique's leading contemporary author, Mia Couto. Couto's fiction is riddled by a central paradox - it forges a distinct postmodern national identity for a country historically plagued by repeated and detrimental interference from abroad. Phillip Rothwell argues that Couto is a writer who eschews and reinforces the national frontier. In fact, Couto produces a cultural phenomenon that is markedly Mozambican by corrupting aspects of the European legacy Portugal left on the African continent, fusing this distortion with a corrupted version of African heritage, and demarcating literary boundaries through fluidity." "The book details Couto's life and literary trajectory, and interprets essential aspects of Mozambican political and cultural history before undertaking a range of analyses of his work. The postmodern relativization of the concept of a unitary truth furnishes the springboard for an interrogation of what "truth" has meant to Mozambique as exemplified in Couto's texts. The paradoxes inherent in the politics of orthography are scrutinized in Couto's universe to illustrate the aporia prevalent in an atavistic reclaiming of a pre-Portuguese system of writing. Rothwell then engages with the moral meaning of orality and literacy in the tradition Couto both defies and defines, to demonstrate Couto's simultaneous disavowal of misographic and graphophile epistemologies. The manners in which Couto breaches the frontier between the conscious and unconscious realms and blurs gender distinctions are read alongside traditional delineations in order to understand the extent to which Couto's message is radically political. Rothwell concludes with a reading of one of Couto's most potent works in which, through an empowering attack on the United Nations' invasion of Mozambique, Couto enjoins his fellow nationals to begin to resist the postmodern age." "Couto's ambivalent use of the tropes of postmodernism are discussed throughout the book, particularly the way in which it has evolved into a political agenda that is fiercely Mozambican. Rothwell demonstrates Couto's reevaluation of Grand Narratives and shows how, in the case of the Mozambican culture of today, postmodernism has become the only Grand Narrative left worth critiquing." "Rothwell explores a broad cross-section of Couto's literary output, from his early short stories to his more recent novels. He places these within the context of a Mozambican and wider lusophone cultural backdrop, providing essential reading and source of reference for all interested in contemporary Portuguese, African, and world literatures."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In Jewish Education from Antiquity to the Middle Ages fifteen scholars offer specialist studies on Jewish education from the areas of their expertise. This tightly themed volume in honour of Philip S. Alexander has some essays that look at individual manuscripts, some that consider larger literary corpora, and some that are more thematically organised. Jewish education has been addressed largely as a matter of the study house, the bet midrash. Here a richer range of texts and themes discloses a wide variety of activity in several spheres of Jewish life. In addition, some notable non-Jewish sources provide a wider context for the discourse than is often the case.
A masterful writer working in many genres, Ngugi wa Thiong'o entered the East African literary scene in 1962 with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Uganda. In 1977 he was imprisoned after his most controversial work, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), produced in Nairobi, sharply criticized the injustices of Kenyan society and unequivocally championed the causes of ordinary citizens. Following his release, Ngugi decided to write only in his native Gikuyu, communicating with Kenyans in one of the many languages of their daily lives, and today he is known as one of the most outspoken intellectuals working in postcolonial theory and the global postcolonial movement. In this volume, Ngugi wa Thiong'o summarizes and develops a cross-section of the issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to "decolonize the mind." Ngugi confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature's ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or "orature," and writing, or "literature"; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and Aimé Césaire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature (and orature) and reworks the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose.
