Abstract: The myth/history and orality/literacy oppositions are interrelated ones, through which Aboriginal culture has been stereotyped as the simple inverse of European. The Dreaming has been seen as antithetical to historical consciousness, as it assimilates contingent events to a pre-existing order which is objectified in natural features of the landscape. I argue that The Dreaming is one instance of a more general mode of orientation through which a good deal of what we call history - the purposeful acts of living persons and their known forebears - is also memorialised in the landscape. What is specific to Aboriginal sociality is not orality or a mythic mentality, but a particular economy of inscriptive and interpretive practices through which 'country' becomes 'story'. Below I will be discussing what I take to be some characteristically Aboriginal forms of social memory and trying to draw out their implications for some recent attempts to rethink the oppositions between myth and history, orality and literacy. These are of course related oppositions, in that we tend to think of myth as an essentially oral modality and history in the strict sense as a written one. This association itself tends to take on the character of myth in that we regard it as not an historically contingent association, but as a deeply necessary one: the myth:history :: orality:literacy oppositions are homologous ones which together go to the heart of some dominant western constructions of our own social identity in relation to others. But the two bodies of theory I will be addressing here have by and large treated one or the other of these two oppositions in isolation from the other. While I do not have the space, or the brief, to say as much here about the literacy/orality opposition as about the myth/history one, by bringing them together in my conclusion I hope to at least lay some groundwork for a more radical critique of both oppositions, and of associated ways of stereotyping Aboriginal culture as the simple inverse of European. In particular, I will argue that the relevant differences in forms of social memory are best understood, not in terms of a simple binary opposition between orality and literacy, but rather among a potentially much more open ended range of what we can call Inscriptive practices', the relevant Aboriginal one being the use of features of the landscape as a medium for the production and reproduction of meaning. This aspect of Aboriginal practice is by now well known among anthropologists and the general public, but it is usually identified more or less exclusively with myths of the ancestral past, with the dreaming. Drawing on evidence from Munn, Myers and other ethnographers, and on my own fieldwork, I will try to show that it is actually a

Abstract: Preface Part I: Of Origins and Orality 1. The Search of Continuity and Authenticity 2. An Impoverished Paradigm Part II: The Arbitrariness and Specificity of Form 3. The Importance of Genre Epic 4. A Dubious Heroism: Epic Modalities in L'Estrange Destin de Wangrin 5. The Democratization of Epic: Les Bouts de bois de Dieu Initiation Story 6. Authority Reconstructed: Le Regard du roi 7. An Ambiguous Quest: La Carte d'identite Fable 8. "The Emporer's New Clothes": The Lens of Fable in La Vie et demie 9. "The Mouth That Did Not Eat Itself": From Object of Representation to Medium in Devil on the Cross 10. Toward New Readings of the Novel Notes Works Cited Index

Abstract: This new study brings recent scholarly debates on oral cultures and literate societies to bear on the earliest recorded literature in German (800–1300). It considers the criteria for assessing what works were destined for listeners, what examples anticipated readers, and how far both modes of reception could apply to one work. The opening chapters review previous scholarship, and the introduction of writing into preliterate Germany. The core of the book presents lexical and non-lexical evidence for the different modes of reception, taken from the whole spectrum of genres, from dance songs to liturgy, from drama and heroic literature to the court narrative and lyric poetry. The social contexts of reception and the physical process of reading books are also considered. Two concluding chapters explore the literary and historical implications of the slow interpenetration of orality and literacy.

Abstract: Literacy, orality, and the functions of curriculum, W.A. Reid technologies of learning and alphabetic culture - the history of writing as the history of education, K. Hoskin texts, literacy and schooling, D. Hamilton lessons from the literacy before schooling 1800-1850, J. Willinsky the "received tradition" of English teaching - the decline of rhetoric and the corruption of grammar, F. Christie returning history - literacy, difference, and English teaching in the post-war period, T. Burgess literacy and the limits of democracy, J. Donald stories of social regulation - the micropolitics of classroom narrative, A. Luke curriculum as literacy - reading and writing in "new times", C. Lankshear television curriculum and popular literacy - feminine identity politics and family discourse, C. Luke literacy studies and curriculum theorizing or, the insistence of the letter, B. Green.

Abstract: Orality has been a feature repeatedly offered to typify African American language habits. Through anthropological studies of contemporary communities as well as literary portrayals and celebrations of cultural heroes such as preachers and political orators, the strong oral traditions of African Americans have figured prominently in discussions of the contexts of their literary works. This article argues for a balance of this image by laying out historical evidence on the literate values and habits of African Americans since the early 1800s. Literary journals, the Black press, literary writers, and literary societies, especially those of women, between 1830 and 1940 highly valued joint reading groups, creative writing efforts, and the role of literature in the lives of African Americans. Considerable work remains to restore accuracy and cross-class representation of African Americans in English studies, so as to resist tendencies to deny variation in the language habits and values of groups included in mul...

Abstract: Evolution de la representation feminine dans la litterature africaine - du sujet parlant a l'objet ecrit (imperialisme/patriarcat) et reinscription de la femme dans l'histoire

Abstract: Bringing contemporary critical theory to bear on Beowulf, the author explores the literary originality of a poem often treated as oral and traditional. He grounds his work in three axioms about Beowulf. First, the poem cannot be dated with certainty and must be considered a portrait of an imaginary society. Second, the epic, a long narrative poem of the heroic age, is not necessarily a traditional genre. And third, there is no reason to believe that Beowulf was anything more than a fictitious hero invented by the poet. The first half of the book examines the literary treatment of such concepts as space and time, history and transcendence , and orality and literacy, in Beowulf and other Old English poems. The author s method here is mostly phenomenological the sort of intellectual and religious history exemplified by Paul Ricoeur. The second half is dominated by psychoanalysis, beginning with the psychoanalytic anthropology of Victor Turner and RenZ Girard. Then Freud leads the author to consider questions of individual consciousness, creativity, and reader response. The book concludes by probing the creative autonomy of the Beowulf poet as well as of the reader, and their mutual interest in the hero s freedom beyond his fate.

Abstract: Contents: R.E. Young, Y. Liu, Introduction (1994). K. Burke, The Five Master Terms (1943). M. Bilsky, M Hazlett, R.E. Streeter, R.M. Weaver, Looking for an Argument (1953). W.C. Booth, The Rhetorical Stance (1963). K.L. Pike, Beyond the Sentence (1964). R.E. Hughes, The Contemporaneity of Classical Rhetoric (1965). D.G. Rohman, Pre-Writing: The Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process (1965). C. Perelman, Rhetoric and Philosophy (1968). S. Consigny, Rhetoric and Its Situations (1974). J.E. Miller, Jr., Everyman with a Blue Guitar: Imagination, Creativity, Language (1974). S.M. Halloran, On the End of Rhetoric, Classical and Modern (1975). J. Emig, Writing as a Mode of Learning (1977). J.W. Corder, Varieties of Ethical Argument, With Some Account of the Significance of Ethos in the Teaching of Composition (1978). W.J. Ong, Literacy and Orality in Our Times (1978). J. Britton, Shaping at the Point of Utterance (1980). J.R. Hayes, L.S. Flower, Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes (1980). D.B. Park, The Meanings of "Audience" (1982). R.E. Young, Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing (1982). J.T. Gage, An Adequate Epistemology for Composition: Classical and Modern Perspectives (1984). J.L.K. Kairos, A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric (1986).

Abstract: Introduction: Oral Poetics in Post-Conquest England, Mark C. Amodio Introduction to the Individual Contributions, Sarah Gray Miller 1. Literacy, Orality, and the Poetics of Middle English, Nancy Mason Bradbury 2. Oral Tradition in the Middle English Romance: The Case of Robert of Cisyle, Alexandra Hennesey Olsen 3. Tradition and Heroism in the Middle English Romances, Dave Henderson 4. The Devil's Writing Lesson, John M. Ganim 5. Dorigen's Promise and Scholars' Premise: The Orality of the Speech Act in The Franklin's Tale, Leslie K. Arnovick 6. Oral Tradition and the Canterbury Tales, Ward Parks 7. "Now Holde Youre Mouthe". The Romance of Orality in the Thopas-Melibee Section of the Canterbury Tales, Seth Lerer 8. Wyrchipe: The Clash of Oral-Heroic and Literate-Ricardan Ideals in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Donna Lynne Rondolone 9. The Alliterative Morte Arthure As a Witness to Epic, Britton J. Harwood Contributors

Abstract: The sociolinguistics of Translating Canonical Religious Texts — Discussions of the theory and practice of translating have largely neglected the sociolinguistic factors in translating. This is particularly true in the case of religious texts, in which problems of textual variants, historical criticism, the power of tradition, the tensions between form and content, orality, format, diversities of genres, and interpretive notes play such an important role. As a result, multiple translations of such texts are generally required because of the diverse backgrounds of readers and the various uses of religious texts, for example, study, devotion, proclamation, and liturgy.

Abstract: Yves Simard: « Varieties of French spoken in Ivory Coast » Our purpose in this paper is to present Ivorian Empirical Standard French as the result of vernacularization of Academic French, via two interdependant sociolinguistic factors, by Ivory Coast speakers having at least a secondary school education. These factors are the semantic structures peculiar to orality and the presence of a Pre-Creole French, originally spoken only by the uneducated but now used by the younger generation as a typical Ivorian language.

Abstract: (1994). Making Words Visible: Aspects of Orality, Literacy, Illiteracy and History in Southern Africa. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 3-27.

Abstract: Harvey Graff has argued convincingly that faith in the grand promises of literacy has, more often than not, gone unrewarded The nineteenth century, he contends, provided a fertile climate for educators such as Horace Mann to promulgate the belief that literacy inevitably leads to financial and social success Literacy's failure to satisfy these expectations, Graff points out, is one of the social and cultural contradictions present "in the developing social relationships that make up the essence of history and sociology" Stating a central point of his revisionist understanding of the history of literacy, Graff observes that "the clearest lesson of the nineteenth century as the 'origins of our own time' constitutes much of what I deem a 'literacy myth'" This myth involves a pattern of contradictions which he points to saying, "We may merely reiterate the role of post-Enlightenment ideologies and clusters of social thought and theory in providing the grounding for most of our current notions about literacy, and stress that many, though not all, of the facts of development contradict those assumptions and theories" (Legacies 265) Graff also relies on the concept of continuity in order to interpret the history of literacy To focus on historical continuities, Graff maintains, means eschewing an exaggerated emphasis on change, and rejecting persistent cultural dichotomies Slave narratives exhibit many of the cultural contradictions and continuities present in the social relationships of nineteenth-century America When we look closely and examine the role literacy played in these slaves' lives, patterns of continuity and contradiction serve as analytic and interpretive concepts which help us to reinterpret these roles and better understand the slave's relation to the ruling culture of nineteenth-century America Much of what is revealed in these narratives is the way in which literacy enabled and empowered blacks to gain freedom from, and control over, the ruling culture that enslaved them The narratives also, however, reveal the ways in which literacy, as a tool of white hegemony, sought to exclude and dominate illiterate blacks This contrast marks one of the contradictory ways in which literacy developed among slaves To emphasize continuity, on the other hand, we must eschew the literacy / orality dichotomy and look at black culture's historical legacy of literacy--conceived as a holistic development--as another way that literacy developed among blacks in the nineteenth century Graff's interpretive terminology in The Legacies of Literacy suggests a framework for examining the role of literacy in American slave narratives Too often, readers conceive literacy in these narratives as an emancipating skill which leverages the slave out of bondage and into freedom When critics conceive literacy in more complex ways, it is frequently problematized by attendant poststructuralist conundra which pit language, and hence the process of acquiring literacy, against the narrator's "being" or "authentic self" Or, following the lead of Henry Louis Gates, literacy is conceived as mastery of a system of self-referential signs which, as Houston Baker explains, "imply an ideal critic whose readings would summon knowledge only from the literary system of Afro-America The semantics endorsed by his ideal critic would not be those of a culture They would be the specially consecrated meanings of an intertextual world of 'written art'" (Blues 103) Frederick Douglass's antebellum autobiographies have been the focal point of recent debates over the significance of the acquisition of literacy for slaves The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) exhibit, in an exemplary way, a long tradition of slave autobiography that continually sought new ways to mediate the relation between writer and reader This mediation, however complexly conceived, has elicited from several scholars a discussion that often turns on contemporary theories of language which decenter the speaking subject and suspend "autonomous discourse" alone above nitty-gritty pragmatic social interaction …

Abstract: This essay examines the expectation on the part of audiences in antiquity that Hellenistic narratives would be emplotted according to the compositional technique of architectonic parallelism. After setting the debate concerning the recognition of this technique in the context of the emerging theory of orality and literacy in the work of Lord, Havelock, and Ong, the term finished narratives (as contrasted with an unfinished or half‐finished narrative) is proposed as the theoretical means by which Dionysius of Halicamassus and Diodorus Siculus distinguished narratives with reference to this organizing technique. This is followed by a rhetorical analysis of two narrative complexes from the Gospel of Mark. They are offered as evidence that the first century A.D. author, Mark, could assume a Greco‐Roman audience would expect this phenomenon as a genre restraint, which, in turn, permitted him to allow argument to be a function of arrangement.

Abstract: Etude statistique portant sur la langue romanesque de Dickens: recherche des marqueurs linguistiques de la chronologie narrative; contraste entre les premieres oeuvres et les plus recentes; mutation du complexe style formel en style oral

Abstract: Tibetan Buddhist writings have long been intimately associated with various forms of orality. An understanding of how Buddhist texts are read or encountered in Tibetan traditions requires that we consider the forms of orality in which such textual encounters are embedded. I see Tibetan oral genres as falling into two broad categories. The first is explanatory, such as the oral philosophy referred to here, and its primary purpose is to amplify the meaning of a text. The second is more ritualistic, for it includes oral forms in which sound rather than meaning is paramount, such as the recitation of mantra or various forms of rhythmic chanting. Tibetan oral performances vary considerably in terms of how they balance explanatory and ritual power, some utilizing one genre almost to the exclusion of the other, some having both but emphasizing one or the other. In practice, therefore, these two genres are often intertwined. The variety of Tibetan oral genres, their relationship with written

Abstract: A travers le temoignage d'une Nigerianne (Sade) qui explique devant une foule attentive son experience de sorciere (a l'annonce de sa sterilite elle est retournee vers l'Eglise et, miracle, a donne naissance de une fille) l'A. montre le renouveau du genre oral dans le temoignage chretien. Cette autobiographie a une base spirituelle mais possede aussi un merite litteraire. La performance orale est plus vivante que sa version ecrite

Abstract: With reference to the discussion by Jaco Alant on orality, I would like to emphasise certain points raised which correlate with my overview of 'Zulu Oral Traditions'. Firstly, 'the study of orality deals specifically, not so much with speaking in its everyday sense ... but, in fact, with particular culturally defined forms of speaking. As such, orality studies are about oral genres'. Secondly, 'the crucial factor in distinguishing between orality and literacy should lie in certain characteristics of the language used. An oral conception of language may well, at times, manifest itself as writing, just as a highly literate conception of language may be put across orally'. Ong makes the important point that 'oral cultures concern themselves with doings, with happenings, not with being as such: they narrativize their own existence and their environment'. (1988:8).

Abstract: In The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Brian Stock grapples with the thorny problem of defining literacy.(1) Although most of us think of it as the ability to read and write, Stock takes care to specify that literacy is not equivalent to textuality.(2) In the Middle Ages, literacy was informed by a tradition of oral composition and declamation that was subsequently lost. Stock settles on a working definition of literacy as "the complex interplay of orality with textual models for understanding and transmitting the cultural heritage."(3) In this study, I intend to apply Stock's notion of literacy to fourteenth-century copies of the Roman de la Rose. According to Stock, medieval society after the eleventh century was oriented increasingly towards the scribe and the written word rather than oral performance.(4) In Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong points out that manuscript culture nonetheless always remained marginally oral.(5) The authors of the Rose provide implicit commentary on the movement from an oral tradition of composition and delivery of a work to its transmission in written form. Manuscript illustrations plus independent testimony about the oral delivery of other medieval works suggest that copies of the Rose were used as supports for oral readings.(6) They were also lovingly examined and read silently by the wealthy patrons who had commissioned their fabrication and pored over by the clerkly class who studied and recopied them. The thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose inscribes into its textual fabric the fiction of its own creation. In a focal passage located near the approximate middle of the entire romance (vv. 10465-10650, Lecoy edition, referred to hereafter as the conjoined Rose midpoint passage), the God of Love, the ultimate inspirational force behind both the action--the love quest--and the composition of the work about love, relates how Jean de Meun will take up the task of completing the Rose forty years after the death of the first author, Guillaume de Lorris. Jean de Meun, speaking through the mouthpiece of the God of Love, highlights the cooperative effort of poetic continuation by a technique of textual citation: quotation of the last six verses of Guillaume's poem (vv. 10525-10530) is followed several verses later by quotation of the first two verses of Jean's continuation (vv. 10565-10566). Jean and Guillaume are also made to take their place in a line of Latin elegiac poets stretching back to Tibullus, Gallus, Catullus, and Ovid. Jean de Meun thereby melds a succession of written models with a lyric tradition that is oral, at least at its inception. The lyric, whose first-person speaker expresses a love experience directly to an audience, treats the immediate communication of felt emotion. In the conjoined Rose midpoint passage, the God of Love discusses the education of the budding love poet, Jean de Meun (vv. 10607-10613): the God of Love himself will sing such notes of love to Jean that when the young man grows up, he will "pipe our words" ("fleutera noz paroles") to all who come to hear him. The following is one formulation of the generic experiment undertaken in the Rose: a lyric tradition of love poetry, felt and expressed directly, was infused into the framework of a romance tradition with a long history of textual transmission.(7) The Roman de la Rose, which deals simultaneously with the experience of falling in love and the composition of a narrative about that very experience, is a text that metaphorizes its own processes of reading and writing. One example especially germane to our discussion of literacy is Guillaume's depiction of the drama between Echo and Narcissus, which on one level figures the recuperation of orality by the written text. When the Lover arrives at the fountain, his reading of a written inscription, "ilec desus/estoit morz li biau Narcissus" (vv. …

Abstract: (1994). Orality and the craft of modern Nigerian poetry: Osundare's Waiting Laughters and Udechukwu's What the Madman Said. African Languages and Cultures: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 101-119.

Abstract: Printed transcripts of speeches used by critics are often arbitrary. A richer insight into the rhetorical process may be achieved by incorporating orality into criticism. This study of Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream Speech”; emphasizes the importance of orality, which is a dimension of textual authenticity, that can influence the content, form of a speech transcript, and the act of criticism. Examination of the “Dream”; speech demonstrates, however, that incorporation of orality does not necessarily provide answers to all of the critic's questions.

Abstract: The term orality only exists, for purposes of scientific interest at least, in so far as it refers to and evokes a particular continuum 1: orality-literacy. I am concerned, in this article, with highlighting the problematic nature of only the first pole of this continuum. Literacy, however, poses problems of its own, and the question What is writing? has no simple answer. Moreover, depending on one's definition of the latter, even the (generally accepted) chronological relation suggested by the continuum (orality was first, then came literacy) can be a matter of dispute. I shall consider orality in relation to a writing conceived of in only its, to us, most obvious form, namely phonetlc writing: visible marks that are intended to represent specific sounds of a specific language. This approach will quite obviously also place my argument within the framework of the above-mentioned chronology.