Abstract: List of figures Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: building models like a wigwam 2. Text 3. Orality and genre 4. Myth 5. Literacy 6. Tradition 7. Memorization 8. M. L. West and the Eastern origins of Greek tradition 9. Cultural transmission by literate means in the Near East 10. Writing: general 11. Writing: semasiography and logosyllabography 12. Writing: the Chinese enigma 13. Oral and written in the land between the rivers 14. Oral and written in the Valley of the Nile 15. The West Semitic revolution 16. The invention of the Greek alphabet and the end of multiliteralism 17. Where does Homer fit in the alphabetic revolution? 18. The aoidos in context 19. Aoidic innovation in myth: stories from pots 20. Summary and conclusions: early Greek literature in context Bibliography Index.

Abstract: In an original, widely researched, and accessibly written book, Robert Dale Parker helps redefine the study of Native American literature by focusing on issues of gender and literary form. Among the writers Parker highlights are Thomas King, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ray A. Young Bear, some of whom have previously received little scholarly attention.Parker proposes a new history of Native American literature by reinterpreting its concerns with poetry, orality, and Indian notions of authority. He also addresses representations of Indian masculinity, uncovering Native literature's recurring fascination with restless young men who have nothing to do, or who suspect or feel pressured to believe that they have nothing to do. The Invention of Native American Literature reads Native writing through a wide variety of shifting historical contexts. In its commitment to historicizing Native writing and identity, Parker's work parallels developments in scholarship on other minority literatures and is sure to provoke controversy.

Abstract: This collection puts together the writings of Walter Ong, a scholar who has offered his own observations about voice, orality, speech, literacy, communication and culture.

Abstract: The above questions posed by the scholar Brent Edwards capture the core of the enduring and engaging critical debate within African-American literary study over the nexus between orature and literature, or orality and textuality. Edwards' exhorts scholars of African-American poetics to refocus our critical lens so that it blurs the facile dichotomies made between "orality/literacy, craft/politics, and (inarticulate) music/ (articulate) writing" (Edwards 580). Such an adjustment might successfully yield an appropriate sense of the dynamic interplay between vocal and visual characteristics in musically influenced Black poetry. A scholarship that recognizes the oral and textual as imbricated, not disparate, elements in African-American poetics would enrich our understanding of how the vocal and visual are performed across the geographic space of the page. In fact, some of the most prominent AfricanAmerican practitioners in the craft of verse have called attention to the intrinsic interconnection between orality and literacy as an essential element of a Black aesthetic. For example, in an interview in The Furious Flowering of African-American Poetry, Michael Harper marked the presence of "a certain kind of intelligence" and a "certain kind of literacy which is not necessarily written down ... which is always in dialogue because we're always participating in what I call a long dialogue" (Gabbin 85). More succinctly, in the introduction to Soulscript, An Anthology of Afro-American Poetry, June Jordan declared, "poems are voiceprints of language"; they are "soulscript." The concepts of "voiceprint," "soulscript," and unwritten literacy as metaphors for the presence and performance of Black poetry are compelling. They associatively link the technology of writing with the sign of racialized speech, what the AfricanAmerican linguist John Rickford characterized as "Spoken Soul." As scholars, we would do well to heed the cue for interpretive possibilities that these metaphors open up in our readings of African-American literature in general and poetry in particular. One of the dangers of the traditional reading-in the sense of critical interpretation

Abstract: Story as History-History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History, by Samuel Byrskog. WUNT 123. Tubingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2000. Pp. xix + 386. Eur49.00. In the tradition of his teacher Birger Gerhardsson's Memory and Manuscript (Lund: Gleerup, 1961), Byrskog, who previously examined the transmission of the Jesus tradition in the Matthean community in Jesus the Only Teacher (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1994), here proposes that the modern discipline of oral history provides a framework for overcoming the dichotomy between narrative and history in the study of the gospel tradition. In this volume he searches "the ancient texts for encoded clues as to if and how they expressed and conceived the oral history behind their textualized works" (p. 46, emphasis original here and below). This book is not lacking in important observations on the relation of orality to literacy, the need to attend to the sociocultural environment of the early Christians, the unavoidable interpretative nature of all historical narratives, and so forth. But Byrskog's attempt to marshal such observations into a carefully nuanced description of the formation of the gospel tradition is subverted by his overriding contention that the Gospels are throughout based on historical fact mediated by eyewitnesses. Curiously, Byrskog insists that his study is "not another attempt to defend the reliability of the gospel tradition" (p. 6). Rather he believes that his approach bolsters a "sophisticated" understanding of the ancient process of narrativization that allows for the preservation of factual history even as the evangelists inscribed their own stories in the gospel tradition. This is the point of the oft-repeated mantra, "story as history-history as story." But there is little parity between the elements in this equation. Chapter 1 introduces the modern discipline of "oral history" and suggests that attention to its ancient counterpart will illuminate the role of "autopsy" (Byrskog's preferred term for "eyewitness testimony") in the formation of the gospel tradition. Insisting that oral history revives ancient values about relating to the past, Byrskog identifies the ancient historians from Herodotus on as constituting the basic comparative material for investigation. That this genre is appropriate for a study of the formation of the gospel tradition is simply presupposed. Chapter 2 first reviews the procedures of the major historians (Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, Tacitus) and notes their similarity to oral historians insofar as they related to the past either directly through self-observation or indirectly through eyewitnesses. The historians' emphatically visual manner of relating to the past leads to the corollary that eyewitness testimony was integral to the development of the gospel tradition. Indeed, "circumstantial evidence" in the Gospels points to various local people-Peter, the women with Mary Magdalene, and members of Jesus' family-as the evangelists' informants. Byrskog admits that "real people can of course be fictionalized to various degrees," but judges "a sharp and one-eyed distinction between story and history" to be "untenable" (p. 91). Chapter 3 first builds a case for understanding autopsy in the ancient world as essentially a form of orality and suggests that this coincides well with the identification of discipleship as the "matrix of hearing and seeing" in the instance of the gospel tradition. Then it treats the relation between orality and literacy, arguing that writing functioned primarily as an aide-memoire. Thus Byrskog can characterize "the literacy displayed in the gospel tradition as, in essence, a form of 'secondary' orality," that is, "`memorative literature', written from memory to memory" (p. 127). Chapter 4 considers how the present colors perception of the past. Byrskog first profiles the eyewitness as interpreter in connection with the oral history tenet that participants be allowed to influence our understanding of the past. …

Abstract: 1. Members of the ChiLPA Project, Abo Akademi University 2. Introduction: Children's literature as communication (by Sell, Roger D.) 3. Part I. Initiating: Resources at hand 4. 1. Literacy and orality: The wise artistry of The Pancatantra (by Bengtsson, Niklas) 5. 2. Orality and literacy, continued: Playful magic in Pushkin's Tale of Tsar Saltan (by Orlov, Janina) 6. 3. Intertextualities: Subtexts in Jukka Parkkinen's Suvi Kinos novels (by Rattya, Kaisu) 7. 4. Intertextualities, continued: The connotations of proper names in Tove Jansson (by Bertills, Yvonne) 8. 5. The verbal and the visual: The picturebook as a medium (by Nikolajeva, Maria) 9. Part II. Negotiating: Issues examined 10. 6. Growing up: The dilemma of children's literature (by Nikolajeva, Maria) 11. 7. Childhood: A narrative chronotope (by Johnston, Rosemary Ross) 12. Child-power?: Adventures into the animal kingdom - The Animorphs series (by Lassen-Seger, Maria) 13. Gender and beyond: Ulf Stark's conservative rebellion (by Osterlund, Mia) 14. Politics: Gubarev's Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (by Salminen, Jenniliisa) 15. The unspeakable: Children's fiction and the Holocaust (by Kokkola, Lydia) 16. Part III. Responding: Pragmatic variables 17. Early immersion reading: The narrative mode and meaning-making (by Kokkola, Lydia) 18. Reader-learners: Children's novels and participatory pedagogy (by Sell, Roger D.) 19. Primary-level EFL: Planning a multicultural fiction project (by Sell, Charlotta) 20. Secondary-level EFL: Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi (by Ronnqvist, Lilian) 21. Bilingualism, stories, new technology: The Fabula Project (by Edwards, Viv K.) 22. Index

Abstract: For centuries authors have sought to evoke orality through a variety of techniques, generically known as literary dialect, aiming at capturing salient features of speech. This article analyzes some of those techniques and their implications in the representation of regional dialects, foreigner talk, and hybrid languages in works written in Spanish and Portuguese.

Abstract: Irenee de Lyon a joue un role considerable dans l'etablissement du canon des evangiles, notamment en pointant la necessite mystique du chiffre 4, permettant d'accorder un statut special aux evangiles de Jean, Luc, Matthieu et Marc, l'evangile tetramorphe. L'A. etudie dans l'Adversus haereses les differents usages du terme evangelion pour eclairer la facon dont Irenee envisageait l'Evangile, unite dotee de quatre aspects, face a la multiplicite des textes heretiques.

Abstract: An often-neglected aspect of interactive policy making is the symbolic interaction between professionals and citizens, specifically the way they speak, the kind of orality that is involved The orality of officials is text bound and texts on the environmental attain a firm position in the discourse of these officials, quite different from the orality of citizens The characteristics of orality and literacy, from a communicative viewpoint, vary considerably In literacy details and figures matter; in orality it is the intention of the speaker and the gist of the story that counts most By bringing in a large amount of literacy in oral presentations, officials spoil the functions of orality, its effects on learning, its creative potential, the way how, via stories, many people can get involved or how trust is developed Officials can conquer the orality of the people, they can cope with it in a strategic way or they can deal with it as a valuable asset in policy making For this officials have to rethink the way they speak Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Abstract: The intense scholarly debate concerning the shift from orality to literacy has not often directly concerned African historians in spite of the fact that many work closely with oral sources. In the process of publishing a series of locally-written histories, I discovered that transforming oral tradition into written form is ultimately political. It raised a number of important ethical dilemmas for me as a scholar and brought to my attention the power relations inherent in these transactions. Oral knowledge and its transformation is not neutral or entirely benevolent. I found out that the change from an oral to a written knowledge base takes power out of the hands of community elders and puts it into the public domain, where literate men have the advantage and where community security may be vulnerable. As scholars we need to face our own involvement in these political processes, even if we cannot ultimately control them.

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction: Metamorphoses of Genre PROSE: THE POETICIZED NOVEL 1 Orality and the Novels of the First Generations 2 The Rise of West African Magical Realism 3 Beyond Magical Realism POETRY: BETWEEN PAGE AND STAGE 4 Individual Voices 5 Orality and Performance DRAMA: FROM A DIFFERENT DIMENSION 6 The Paths of the Pioneers 7 Mohammed ben Abdallah's Search for an African Theatre CONCLUSION: HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVES BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abstract: The deployment of oral forms in the written work of African writers is a more complex process than would perhaps appear at first sight. Frequently theorised about but seldom achieved, the effective transposition of the oral into the written involves successfully negotiating the ontological gap between oral and written modes. This entails a shift from the spoken to the written word, from live audience to absent reader, from reciprocity and interaction to a process of private interpretation removed (sometimes distantly) in time and place. This article examines attempts by four South African writers to deploy elements of orality in their written stories. It argues that the stories of Jordan and Matshoba are the most conspicuously oral-derived, and yet are the least satisfactory as (written) literary works. Ndebele thematises orality in his stories without, however, allowing this to become an integral part of the narrative style of his work, while Head is the most successful 'oral stylist' of the four in brid...

Abstract: This study analyses the linguistic characteristics of a new medium of synchronous text-based computer-mediated communication called Chat. This communication and the type of discourse developed exhibit many oral qualities. These qualities of orality are analyzed starting from the conditions that surround the communication act and of the type of discursive activity that is developed, because the chat should be understood as a new communication system, with rules and forms of its own.

Abstract: Modern scholarly interest in orality began with the writings of Milman Parry in the 1920s and 1930s. 2 Since that time the literature on the subject has mushroomed. In his 1985 annotated bibliography John Foley listed over 1,800 entries related to oral theory, 1,500 of which stem—directly or indirectly—from Parry’s pioneering work. 3 It was only in the 1960s, however, that scholars began to take an active interest in applying oral theory to the biblical documents, with their primary focus on the OT. 4 It was Werner Kelber’s writings in the late 1970s and early 1980s that served to increase interest in the relationship between oral tradition and the NT documents. 5 In the 1990s scholars in increasing numbers began to call for a consideration of orality in NT studies. 6 Nevertheless, most biblical scholars continue to examine the NT documents using presuppositions that apply more to nineteenth and twentieth-century literary/print culture than to the culture in which those documents were originally produced. Before proceeding further, therefore, it will be necessary to give some thought to the nature of first-century culture.

Abstract: and without exploring the music, as “musical propaganda” (p. 91). In that Weill neither embraced communism nor agreed with Brecht on this work, Sheppard’s spotlight on him, like that on Perséphone and some other works, seems somewhat ill informed. One begins to sense that written texts are leading Sheppard away from the works themselves and their histories as events. Sheppard’s tendency towards generalization and text-oriented research most negatively shapes the cultural critique of his last chapter (pp. 243–62). Discussing ideology with broad concepts and partial history can be a dangerous endeavor, as Sheppard demonstrates when he claims that “modernists did generally believe that the creation of new ritualistic music theater would be a masculine affair,” without considering either sexual politics of any kind or the role of women in modern dance (p. 246). His sweeping claim that masks “conceal and suppress” individuality surely does not reflect all of twentieth-century experience. And his conclusion that “ritual sacrifice” in music theater reflects the “integrated ritualized performance” of totalitarian regimes (p. 249) is simply too far-fetched to be accepted as plausible. Here, Sheppard’s terminological fuzziness takes its interpretive toll. In the end one feels that Sheppard has attempted too much, and that he has not yet properly digested the large number of works he highlights in his vast survey. Like Albright, he repeatedly runs the risk of losing history in his attempts to order music theater in the twentieth century according to broad concepts. Yet unlike Albright, he does not replace history with conclusive philosophical argumentation or a convincing idea. One closes Sheppard’s book with the sense that he is a brilliant scholar, who has produced an utterly impressive first book, but his unclear objectives have caused his work to hover, unfortunately, between cultural criticism and textbook survey in an uncomfortable gap of scholarly endeavor.

Abstract: A partir d'une recherche realisee a Kankan (Republique de Guinee) entre 1992 et 1994, l'A. examine l'impact de l'alphabetisation sur l'oralite, centrant son analyse sur l'histoire de l'invention de l'alphabet N'ko par Souleymane Kante et ses consequences pour les traditions orale et ecrite dans le monde mande contemporain. Il tente de repondre a plusieurs questions, d'une part, en situant l'experience de S. Kante dans le contexte des debats africains actuels, d'autre part, en reexaminant l'histoire du N'ko et de S. Kante lui-meme. Qui etait Souleymane Kante ? Pourquoi est-il considere comme un heros culturel ? Quelle est sa contribution au debat sur la litterature en langues africaines ? Quelles etaient ses intentions en creant un nouvel alphabet ? Comment fut generee et disseminee une litterature en alphabet N'ko ? Quel est l'impact de l'alphabetisation sur la transmission de la tradition orale ?

Abstract: After the anonymous (and still undated) poet of Beowulf, Cynewulf has a good claim to be the most important Anglo-Saxon poet whose vernacular verse has survived. As the accepted author of no fewer than 2,601 lines, such a claim would on its own be uncontested, but recent work has emphasized still further Cynewulf’s central importance: his influence on the Andreas-poet has been suggested, and it seems that Cynewulf himself may be the author of Guthlac B. 1 The existence of a group of so-called “Cynewulfian poems” (such as The Dream of the Rood and The Phoenix) bears powerful witness to his pre-eminence among Anglo-Saxon poets whose names we know. It is therefore, perhaps, surprising that so little scholarly attention has been focused on the extent to which Cynewulf managed to combine inherited elements of an ultimately oral poetic tradition with aspects of an imported (and ultimately Latin-derived) literate tradition of poetic composition. It is this tension between orality and literacy, and the extent to which Cynewulf can be said to stand at the interface of these two traditions, that this article will seek to explore. That Cynewulf was a literate poet, writing in response to a literate, Latin-derived tradition seems abundantly clear. Of the four runically signed poems attributed to Cynewulf—namely Fates of the Apostles and Elene in the Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII) and Christ II and Juliana in the Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library 3501)—Latin sources have been identified for no fewer than three, 2 and, indeed, wider generic and 1 The fullest analysis of the influence of Cynewulf on Andreas is by Powell (2002:espec. Appendix C); see too Orchard forthcoming a. For the argument that Cynewulf is author of Guthlac B, see Orchard forthcoming a and b. I am grateful to Professor Orchard for giving me access to his papers pre-publication. 2 Elene derives from a version of the Vita S. Cyriaci, Juliana from a version of the

Abstract: Die "Bindung Isaaks" im Kanon (Gen 22): Grundlagen and Programm einer kanonischintertextuellen Lekture, by Georg Steins. Herder: Freiburg, 1999. Pp. x + 302. C45.00. The polyvalency of the Bible presents serious difficulty for those who expect a symphony of voices in perfect harmony. Rather than celebrating the multiple witnesses to revelation, many interpreters search earnestly for a norm by which to read the seams and to mute the cacophony. Steins opts for the canon as controlling norm but seeks to provide methodological rigor. As a test case, he studies the Akedah (Gen 22:1-19). The book therefore consists of two distinct and roughly equal parts, method and application. The result, a Habilitationsschrift from the University of Munster, illustrates both the potential of canonical criticism and its weaknesses. Context shapes the manner in which a given text is read; that much seems clear. The problem arises when one insists that a particular external context takes precedence over others. First, which canon provides the structure for reading-the Pentateuch, the poetic books, prophetic texts, Wisdom literature; Hebrew Bible or Septuagint; ancient Near Eastern literature or Jewish extrabiblical literature? Second, which religious community-jewish, Christian, or neither? Third, what manuscript tradition, or oral tradition, or stage of transmission is definitive-the final destination or stages on the journey? Steins subscribes to a positive understanding of canonical reading, despite these inherent flaws, and endeavors to salvage the enterprise by providing a methodological underpinning. His proposal has three ingredients: dialogic discourse as outlined by Mikhail Bakhtin, intertextuality as propounded by Julia Kristeva, and psychological insights of reception theory. The initial pages, nearly half the book (pp. 1-102), offer elaborate analysis of these three prongs; here and there one comes across perceptive insights about this oft-discussed duo, along with incisive quotations (e.g, Kristeva's formulation of a post-Cartesian axiom: "I speak, you hear me; therefore we are"). Few readers today would contest the claim that discourse is polyphonic, that metatexts enrich one's understanding of a given textual unit, and that three factors-author, text, and reader-make up the dynamic of interpretation. Where I find the method wanting is at the point of choosing hypotexts, specifically Gen 12;1-19; Exod 3-4; 19-24; 29:38-46; Lev 8-9; 16; and Dent 8:2-6; 12, for the test case, Gen 22:1-19. The mere occurrence of similar vocabulary (in particular, three days, rain, burnt offering, mountain, appear, fear) fails to link them in more than a superficial way, for the vocabulary is too common and the substance too disparate to carry the weight of the hypothesis. Steins seems to imply that readers would have thought of each one of these texts when interpreting Gen 22:1-19. The few links isolated by linguistic similarities seem altogether accidental, and the fact that they point away from the real problematic of Gen 22, which comes closest to the prologue in the book of Job, does not help. Similarly, the author's assumptions about the position of ancient interpreters on the continuum of orality and literacy, so much in dispute today, raise questions. …

Abstract: Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Folktales (1988) makes a concerted effort to reproduce the oral storytelling of the Creole slaves of the French Antilles in order to explore and promote the cultural and literary notion of "Creoleness." In his collection, Chamoiseau reworks the themes of hunger, dreams, and speech so central to Creole oral narratives. But Creole Folktales is anything but a collection of folkloric transcriptions. By rewriting Creole folktales, Chamoiseau valorizes the orality of the Creole past as a means of unsettling the fixity of writing as defined by the colonial and postcolonial West.

Abstract: This book is an excellent, up-to-date study that addresses a tremendous need. The criticisms I note may stem from editorial limitations set to keep the book within the scope of the series. While specialists in seventeenth-century German music may crave an even more finely detailed biography, this book will be of great assistance to many seeking up-to-date information on this very important and interesting composer. DANE HEUCHEMER Kenyon College