Abstract: List of figures Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Improvisation and characters 3. Residual orality in early modern Italy and the commedia dell'arte 4. Venetian buffoni 5. Early male actors 6. Early actresses 7. Zanni texts, 1576-88 8. Conclusions and caprices: early texts of the Dottore and Pantalone 9. Tristano Martinelli: a company buffone 10. Theatrical and literary 'composition' in Francesco Andreini and Flaminio Scala 11. The generation of Cecchini: technical, moral and dramaturgical publications Notes Bibliography.

Abstract: This volume is concerned with aspects of orality and literacy in the ancient world. It arises from the tremendous contemporary interest among scholars in questions of how literacy and orality co-exist and interact in the ancient world. The contents of the book are refereed papers originally presented at the fifth biennial 'Orality and Literacy in ancient Greece' held at The University of Melbourne in 2002. Papers are offered by scholars from Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia which deal with a range of periods and genres in antiquity, from Homer through to Roman literature. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the ancient world.

Abstract: The paper is divided into three parts. In the first I shall highlight the struc­tural properties of the text, rehearsing some of the arguments I made in my thesis as well as suggesting some new points of interest. For this I shall focus specially on the Jewish novels and the New Testament apocrypha . In the second part I shall concentrate on aspects of both form and content in the short stories which make up the novel and which we might term "novelle" or "folk stories", perhaps even "local legends", comparing them with other documents, both literary and non-literary, from its status as literature draw­ing the relevant conclusions.

Abstract: Introduction 1. The Secret of Judas Thomas 2. Gnosticism Without Demiurge? 3. Body and Community 4. Authority and Autonomy 5. Orality and Textuality 6. Does Thomas Make a Difference? Epilogue Bibliography Index

Abstract: This article takes the early notation of the Office hymns as the framework for a new investigation of orality and literacy in musical notation. Of all chant genres, hymns remained an oral tradition the longest, and the notation of entire hymn repertories was apparently rare before 1100. As a repertory of melodies hardly written down before the eleventh century, the hymns offer an opportunity to study the initial recording of an oral tradition at a time when other chant genres were increasingly notated. The variety of approaches to notating both entire hymn repertories and individual hymns in the sources up to the early twelfth century signals the increasing reliance on writing, as well as the dynamic interaction between orality and literacy, that characterizes monastic textual production in the eleventh century. The article places the notation of hymns in the context of their important role in monastic education and proposes an analogy between hymnaries and monastic customaries.

Abstract: This volume discusses the indirect influence of oral transmission on the genesis and evolution of the Persian written epic tradition. On the basis of formal characteristics of naqqali (Persian storytelling) performance, a set of formal and thematic criteria is proposed to determine the extent to which written Persian epics show structures ultimately deriving from oral performance. It is applied to the Shah-name of Ferdowsi (c. 1000) and to the Garshasp-name of Asadi (c. 1064-66). The first part of the book examines the Oral-Formulaic Theory and proposes an alternative approach focusing on naqqali. The book may be relevant to both oralists and Iranists; it demonstrates the complex process where orality interacts with written tradition in the genesis of the Shah-name.

Abstract: Discursive and cognitive practices of primary oral societies have been described to a significant extent in terms of additive parataxis, context-bound concreteness, and formulaic-repetitive style. Such qualifications as a rule did not emerge from empirical study of specific primary oral societies in their historical unicity but seem to result from universalistic projections on these societies, of pictures from various academic debates such as the Homeric debate, the debate of written versus oral style in English, and the anthropological debate on cognitive dichotomies in terms of literate versus illiterate societies. The only feature that can lay some claim to universality is a specific type of metalanguage in primary oral contexts in which the distinction between wording and intention is not made.

Abstract: This article is a response to Gromov's article entitled Nagona and Mzingile: Novel, Tale or Parable? . Contrary to Gromov's thesis on the structural ambiguity of the novel, we posit that the structure of this novel is discernible if we consider the fluidity of the genre 'novel' and if we bring in elements of socio-cultural patchwork and chaos characterising contemporary African societies. This article argues that the idea of fragmentation which is revealed at the level of an individual and society in the novel, goes very well with its fictional devices. In fact the fictional devices render the discourse of the novel disruption. It is a double-edged design pregnant on the one hand, with religious, philosophical, political and social rhetoric for its literary substance and on the other, 'orality' and 'magic realism' for its fictional strategies which seem to cause 'fragmentariness' that challenge the traditional method of narration with simple temporal linearity.

Abstract: In the sixteenth century, Makassarese in the South Sulawesi courts of Gowa and Talloq began to write.1 What they chose to write were historical texts that chronicled their origins and preserved the words of their ancestors. Scholars once knew how to make sense of such an event: it could not be but a watershed, a fundamental change or turning point of the first magnitude. Such is the nature of what we liked to call the "transition from orality to literacy," yet more careful examinations have suggested that this confidence in the very idea of a shift from orality to literacy was misplaced. Literacy and orality are not states of being that are simply manifested in places like Makassar. This article extends the efforts of scholars to grapple with the considerable overlap, symbiosis, and exchange that seem to characterize a boundary once believed to demarcate firmly orality and literacy. Considerable work has gone into documenting the inadequacy of trying to delineate what formal characteristics mark oral and literate productions. For example, Wendy Doniger notes that it is only when we distinguish among texts that were composed orally, preserved orally, or performed orally "that we begin to glimpse the complexity of the problem" (1991, 31). Similarly, what should we do about traditions such as Javanese wayang in which oral performances are based on stories in texts, even though few puppeteers own, consult, or have even seen the written texts (Sears 1996)? The possible permutations in how oral and literate traditions interplay are many, and dissatisfaction with the very notion of a boundary between orality and literacy widespread (see Flueckiger and Sears 1991). My goals in this article are threefold: first, to review briefly the ongoing reassessment of the relationships between literacy and orality; second, to bolster the growing scholarly consensus that to speak of a "shift" from orality to literacy is at

Abstract: Contents: General editor's preface Introduction The rule of conversation The flesh of words The sight of language The words of fiction The paradoxes of the book Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Abstract: Cultural studies, encounters, and academic publications are composed of layers of subjective experiences and objective data. This article is a personalized attempt to bring together some of the layers relevant to the author's experiences of the Southern Kalahari people. It examines orality, memory, and subjectivity in the search for a methodology through which to represent the “Other.”

Abstract: “Oral tradition”—not a concept I’m really comfortable with, actually. It’s partly its sneaky connotations: “oral” as symbol of the primitive, the other, the marginal at the edge of the triumphant western dream; “tradition”/ “traditional” too: opposed to modern/western/literate/individual/creative, implicitly highlighting transmission and the “old,” downplaying creativity, multiple agency, politics, inventiveness. Nowadays we query those onceobvious ethnocentric universalizing assumptions, of course, and instead explore the overlap and interpenetration of oral and written (their intermingling with other media too—music, dance, material displays, electronic options) and look not to essentialized divisions between “old” and “new” but to historical changes and multiplicities (to changing genres, to new media interacting with established themes, to contemporary forms not just “traditional” ones)—but the older connotations still keep sneaking through. “Oral tradition” isn’t very transparent as an analytical concept anyhow: “oral” with its ambiguity between “voiced” and (the potentially much wider) “non-written”; “tradition” as—what exactly? what’s ruled out? In the areas I’ve worked in (around issues to do with performance, oral/performed literature, narrative, popular culture—in Africa and comparatively) the term “oral tradition” hasn’t proved particularly illuminating as such and isn’t nowadays very widely used. It has pragmatic uses, though. As in this journal, it has served to gather together questions of textuality, orality, voice, text, performance, verbal art in a way too often ignored elsewhere. It fills—and challenges—gaps left in the canons of many established academic disciplines. And its cross-cultural framework and synoptic wide-ranging vision, unfettered by discipline-imposed shibboleths, can take us constructively across language, text, literary analysis, genre, media studies, popular culture, performance, information technology, and

Abstract: The dynamic progression from orality to literacy is embodied in the notation of the prologues to the first court operas. This transition is influenced by the proliferation of printed scores at the beginning of the 17th century and has profound rhetorical consequences for vocal performance. In the first prologues, where the written arie are formulaic, the singer is the creator and authority; s/he controls the musical performance and makes the connection between words and music by means of variation, ornamentation, and improvisation as part of a persuasive dialogue with listeners. In the later prologues, however, the composer rather than the singer is in control of the discourse. Because of a new and more elaborate way of writing out the prologues, where all stanzas are set to music, the singer is now turned into an interpreter of the composer9s rhetorical realization of the words, a realization fixed in the score by musical notation and capable of being brought to life in performance. The prologue can profitably be discussed as a genre in the context of the oral tradition of the late Renaissance, and is illuminated by a number of 16th- and 17th-century Italian sources dealing with lyric poetry, linguistic theory, vocal performance, sound, and listening. In this regard, the edition of Jacopo Peri9s Euridice by Howard Mayer Brown (1981) is open to criticism, because all stanzas of the prologue are written out, which is not in accordance with Peri9s original score (Florence, 1600). The editorial realization of the strophes, therefore, seems to run contrary to the principles of orality according to which the prologue was originally composed.

Abstract: Human Speech has often been presented as the crucial line dividing humanity from animals, with Literacy then entering in as the fulfiller of human destiny, the redeemer from primitive orality, and, in alphabetic apotheosis, the all-conquering hero of the west's civilising mission. This epic tale, pervasive as it still remains, is now under attack from many directions, not least in the expanding work on multiple literacy practices. This paper takes the complementary line of starting from the 'oral' end of the apparent equation. Building on anthropological fieldwork, experience of teaching at the UK's Open University, and the gathering comparative literature, it questions the limiting linguistic bias of this tale – itself a kind of myth explaining and justifying the social order. Verbal language is just one of many modes and media of human communication and can only be fully understood in conjunction with them. The traditional myth also underplays the multiplex nature of language itself: researchers across several disciplines are now increasingly revealing the multimodal nature of human speech and writing. To focus on narrower definitions of language and, as in the heroic elevation of 'orality' and 'literacy', to propose the treatment of language as the crucial factor in human culture is to proffer a thin and single-line tale of human history and, with it, a misleading and ethnocentric account not only of humanity more generally but also of many of our actual educational practices. It needs to be replaced by a broader, more cross-cultural and more generous model of both learning and communication.

Abstract: This paper is about using technology to help people who share knowledge orally. The objective is to appreciate the social and technical needs of this preference so as to narrow the divide developing between these people and those who earn their living from written knowledge sharing. Writing is not the preferred method of knowledge sharing for the majority of peoples on earth nor is it appropriate for the majority of problems. A mix of both literacy and orality is believed to be the ideal, so a failure to develop cheap and relevant synchronous and asynchronous oral knowledge sharing technology may down play the importance of orality in the social and economic development of both the developed and developing nations. This paper will argue that IS designers interested in global diversity, equity, innovation and economic development through communication technology need to place more emphasis on orality. The difference between oral and written knowledge sharing will be discussed to explain the need for both synchronous and asynchronous communication technologies. A small study comparing asynchronous oral and written communication is presented as is an attempt to design an Internet based oral conferencing system to link Aboriginal communities. It was found that there was a need for developing cheap community based conferencing facilities and to improve the asynchronous oral communication technologies.

Abstract: Tradition is communication, the passing on of (social) culture through shared practices and lore. It is an expression of an intense emotional bond between performer and source and, by extension, the cultural manifestations of that relationship at the intersections of memory, orality, and literacy.

Abstract: Two-way communication is at the center of communication management in our times. In the public domain, for example, officials have to organize communicative interaction. In this interaction orality, all communication based on oral language, deserves more attention. The main argument is that the orality of officials is text-bound, inclining towards the literary style, language, and features of documents, which means stressing details and differences. Meanwhile, citizens - as listeners - are more strongly oriented towards the speakers' intentions and the gist of the story. In oral presentations, officials refer to texts due to the special position of policy documents in the policy-making process. Documents are the social products of their thinking and reasoning in a political context and achieve a fixed status in discussions. The consequences are: a loss of genuine interaction (exchange of meanings), a lack of creative participation by citizens, a restricted acceptance of policy plans, and problematic relationships between formal government and citizens. Practical recommendations are offered to cope with these problems.

Abstract: Orality is a significant, multivalent element of Tibetan religious and cultural life. It is profoundly intertwined with the transmission of written texts, the performance of rituals, and esoteric learning. Here I mention only three general categories from the very rich complex of oral practices. These pertain (1) to the teaching of texts, (2) to the pedagogical techniques of debate, and finally (3) to more esoteric understandings of what speech communicates in addition to literal meaning. Textual study is always accompanied by at least one, and often all three, of these oral processes, and by others as well. 1. Texts are not regarded self-explanatory units of information that can be digested outside the community of scholarly or ritual practices. The teacher’s commentary is therefore a crucial element of textual reading. Oral scholarly traditions interpret, organize, compare, critique, expand upon, and make practical suggestions regarding the material in the text. Sometimes these oral discourses are themselves written down and become texts for further oral comment in a subsequent generation. 2. Tibetan pedagogy, as Georges Dreyfus has amply illustrated in his new book, 1 relies on a dialectic of commentary and debate. Debate itself involves a great deal of memorization and oral incantation of texts; debate is an interactive process in which students must defend philosophical positions in the in-your-face give and take of heated debates. These debates are the chief training ground for scholars in many Tibetan traditions; they are also a major spectator sport. Rhetorical strategies involve textual citation, the thrusting of unwanted consequences on the defender, and feinting through chess-like moves that suggest one line of thought when actually headed toward another.

Abstract: The following article applies both quantitative and qualitative methods of research to markers of perspective in a TV interview of Colin Powell on the CNN LARRY KING LIVE program from November 26, 2001. Perspective is well established in phenomenology and social psychology; its starting point is the conviction that every utterance expresses a point of view. From previous research, we accept the dialogical nature of perspective (see O'Connell & Kowal 1998) and further argue that perspective can be observed through measures of orality and literacy and through referencing (name and pronoun reference). The following measures of orality and literacy are examined: Back channeling hesitations, interruptions, contractions and elisions, first person singular pronominals, interjections and tag questions, and turn transitions from interviewer to interviewee and vice versa. We argue further that Colin Powell's perspective stresses the division between "we" and "they" with regard to the then imminent involvement in Iraq. Theoretical implications are discussed. Key words: Perspective, Television political interview, Dialogism, Orality/literacy, Referencing, The Middle East.

Abstract: Modern biblical scholarship is largely a child of the high tech of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. It developed its basic assumptions about and approaches to biblical texts in working with the print Bible, the first major, mechanically constructed book in early modernity. For this reason, the historical, critical scholarship of the Bible has risked laboring under a cultural anachronism, projecting modernity’s communications culture upon the ancient media world. However, despite its resolutely text-centered habits, historical criticism has by no means been unaware of orality’s role in the formation of biblical texts. The impact of form criticism, the method devised to deal with oral tradition, on biblical scholarship of both the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament has been immense. Today, form criticism is besieged with multiple problems, the most significant of which is its complicity with post-Gutenberg assumptions about ancient dynamics of communication. Not only are biblical texts by and large located in close affinity to speech, but the form critical project has turned out to be largely misconceived. Orality studies, therefore, challenge biblical scholarship to rethink fundamental concepts of the Western humanistic legacy such as text and intertextuality, reading, writing and composing, memory and imagination, speech and oral/scribal interfaces, author and tradition. And they invite us to be suspicious of imagining tradition exclusively in closedspace, text-to-text relations, and instead to grow accustomed to notions such as compositional dictation, memorial apperception, auditory reception, and the interfacing of memory and manuscript. Contemporary research in orality is, therefore, anything but a mere embellishment of textual studies. John Miles Foley’s observation that “what we are wrestling with is an inadequate theory of verbal art” applies with particular force to biblical studies

Abstract: The concept of oral tradition, especially as we see it redefined in the work of Milman Parry (1971) and Albert Lord (espec. 1960/2000), has had a major impact on the understanding of Homer and Homeric poetry in the field of classics. Volume 1 of Greek Literature (Nagy 2001) features reprints of twenty studies illustrating this impact, along with an extensive introduction and bibliography. The introduction and bibliography are available gratis at http://chs.harvard.edu/chspubs/ninevol/index.htm. Nowadays, classicists who publish on Homer generally acknowledge the relevance of Parry's and Lord's work, though all too many publications still reveal a woefully superficial understanding of this work (for a list of ten common misunderstandings, see Nagy 1996:19-27). A most pressing problem in the field of classics is that the concept of oral tradition tends to be applied—however superficially—only to Homer, while the rest of Greek literature continues to be studied without an awareness of any need for applying the same concept (for a corrective, see Lord 1991:espec. ch. 2). Another problem is that some influential classicists, in their publications on Homer, have separated the work of Parry from that of Lord (Nagy 2003:ch. 3, with bibliography). A most prominent example is the introduction written by Adam Parry to the collected papers of his father (Parry 1971:ix-lxii). Since most of Milman Parry's work on Homer predated his study of living oral traditions in the former Yugoslavia, the separating of his work from Lord's leaves the relevance of oral traditions to Homeric studies seriously undervalued. This problem folds into a larger problem. Those who have no direct knowledge of oral traditions generally assume that "orality," as distinct from "literacy," can be universally defined. And yet, the only universal distinction between oral and literary traditions is the historical anteriority of the first to the second. Beyond this obvious observation, it is pointless to attempt any universalizing definition of oral or even of written tradition. In

Abstract: The Homerist’s idea of an oral tradition is necessarily different from that of the students of a living oral tradition. Homer is a text and Homeric orality is a matter of philology. Homerists’ notions of oral tradition will thus be mediated by textuality, and Homer’s orality can only be accessed through those features that survive the song’s transcription. Regardless of the existence of written texts surrounding an epic tradition, the tradition is an oral one if it is performed periodically and in more than one locale. The tradition’s expansion in place and survival in time, externally manifested in its transformation into writing, is manifested internally in the ideology of epic kleos, glory as conferred on a hero by poetry. The hero’s kleos can become the song’s kleos in a self-conscious awareness that is particularly clear in Homer. (This is not mere literary sophistication, but a tradition’s consciousness of the possibilities of its own medium.) Performance not only constitutes the dimension of the tradition’s persistence through time; it also focuses the researcher’s interest on the tradition’s textual reflection. Performance is an essential bundling of hermeneutic features of an oral tradition that should inform our study of the tradition as text. As performance, the tradition is a matter of stylized, intensified speech, so that the study of pragmatics and spoken language can be brought to bear on the study of the tradition as text. Two features seem to me of particular importance here:

Abstract: 1. Preface 2. Introduction (by Carroll, Ruth) 3. "When you read or hear this story read": Issues of orality and literacy in Old English texts (by Warvik, Brita) 4. Telling the anchorite code: Ancrene Wisse on language (by Hiltunen, Risto) 5. Lexical borrowings in early Middle English religious discourse: A case study of Sawles Warde (by Skaffari, Janne) 6. The catalogue: A late Middle English Lollard genre? (by Peikola, Matti) 7. Recipes for laces: An example of a Middle English discourse colony (by Carroll, Ruth) 8. "Best patterns for your imitation": Early modern letter-writing instruction and real correspondence (by Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa) 9. "Let me not lose yr love & friendship": The negotiation of priority and the construction of a scientific identity in seventeenth-century natural history (by Valle, Ellen) 10. Index

Abstract: The relationship between tense and orality has been of major interest to linguists working on tense, aspect and discourse in a number of languages, and illuminating, if highly controversial, parallels have been drawn between the patterns found in various different types of oral narration. In the case of French, much research has been done on conversational narration, and connections have been made between contemporary temporal patterning (notably as regards tense switching) and that found in medieval data. Yet the term 'oral narration'is not synonymous here; the medieval narrations represent highly crafted performances, while the conversational data is spontaneous and informal. This paper proposes an analysis of tense switching in a contemporary performed variety of oral narration, the neo-conte. While many of the functions of tense switching in discourse prove to be relatively familiar, the patterns found in the «neo-conte» reveal complex-and at times apparently contradictory-influences from both spoken French and literary norms. Along with other types of discourse such as newspaper French, the patterns in oral story-telling pose questions for contemporary models of the French tense system, especially those based on a fundamental binary divide, such as written versus spoken discourse, «monde raconte» versus «monde commente» or «histoire» versus «discours».