Abstract: An oral tradition is a transmission of thought over generations by the spoken word and techniques of communication other than writing. Under this definition, such items as poems, lyrics, proverbs, and maxims, of course, qualify as elements of our oral traditions. So too do drum texts and art motifs. But languages do have embedded in their syntax and semantics various notions about reality and human experience. Through these, our habits of speech influence our habits of writing. And so we cannot regard written traditions as altogether independent of orality. I illustrate this point with a brief discussion of the influence of orality in the empiricism of John Locke and in the normative conception of personhood in African philosophy.

Abstract: Introduction 1. Prospero's Language, Caliban's Voice 2. Language, Learning and Power 3. Language and Race 4. Language and Place 5. Language and Identity 6. Language, Culture and Meaning: the Caribbean 7. Caliban's Books - Orality and Writing 8. How Books Talk 9. Translation and Transformation Bibliography

Abstract: During the Romantic era, especially in Italy, performers known as improvvisatori and improvvisatrici extemporised poetry in public in response to subjects requested by their audiences. This type of performance fascinated Grand Tourists from northern Europe, who reported on poetic improvisers in hundreds of travel accounts, journals, letters, and periodical articles. By uncovering historical data and interpreting literary texts, Professor Esterhammer identifies patterns in the evolving responses of English, German, French, and Russian writers to the experience of improvisation. She explores how improvisation interacts with Romantic ideas about genius, spontaneity, orality, and emotional expressiveness, and relates to evolving concepts of gender and nation. Esterhammer goes on to interpret the influence that the figure of the poetic improviser had in nineteenth-century English and European fiction. In this context, the improvvisatore casts new light on conflicts between poetic genius and socio-economic constraints, and on the evolution of the Bildungsroman.

Abstract: Literacy was once thought to be well understood and well defined. However, it has been argued that the digital world has disrupted previous notions of literacy, supplanting them with “new” forms of literacies—first in various new literacy studies and now in the library and information science (LIS) scholarship as it applies to information literacy (IL). But do the old forms of literacy in fact hold LIS back? Do the critiques of conceptions of literacy fully represent that foundational scholarship? Are the “new” literacies really all that different from traditional notions of literacy? A review both of concepts of literacy and IL that have been critiqued and of core ideas of foundational scholarship on the shift from orality to literacy that stand at the center of the scholarly debate over literacy in general, together with an identifying of conceptual foundations of critical reflexivity that underwrite “new” literacies, is undertaken here to inform the scholarly assumptions and claims of LIS and IL.

Abstract: The contexts and characteristics of manuscript circulation -- Handwriting and the work of copyists -- The manuscript circulation of lyric and burlesque poetry -- The manuscript circulation of prose -- Authors and their readers : dedications and other paratexts -- Orality, manuscript and the circulation of verse.

Abstract: To demarginalize Africa and the Third World with regard to knowledge as well as in all other respects, to ensure ... that the margin be no longer margin but part and parcel of a multi-faceted whole, a centre of decision among other centres of decision, an autonomous centre of production among others, such is today a major task. But such appropriation by the periphery of all the useful knowledge supposes further, a conscious effort towards a critical but resolute re-appropriation of one's own practical and cognitive heritage, a negation of the marginality of one's endogenous knowledge and know-how, and a re-insertion of the 'traditional' into a living tradition that looks out to the future. (Hountondji 1997: 36) Paulin Hountondji's demands for the study of knowledge in Africa offer a suitable starting point for the theme of this special issue. His words flag up points of practical engagement and sketch a desirable perspective of Africa as a self-confident, forward-looking centre of knowledge production. This special issue contributes towards this endeavour by presenting empirically grounded case studies of 'knowledge in practice'. More specifically, the articles illustrate the construction and exercise of 'expertise' in numerous settings, and reflect theoretically upon the criteria by which expert knowledge is judged and the social processes of its validation. While the articles are analytical (rather than political), they respond to Hountondji's challenges by providing focused discussions on Africa's diverse 'practical and cognitive heritage'. They investigate the ways in which expertise and the transmission of knowledge are part of meaningful living traditions, grounded in everyday life and connected to the wider world. Notably, the epigraph is taken from Hountondji's introduction to a volume on 'endogenous knowledge' (1) that progressively explores the relations between Africa's longstanding traditions of science and literacy with its ever-present traditions of orality and myth. In contrast to Hountondji's earlier stance (see Hountondji 1996), the African researchers do not reinforce polarity and opposition, but instead testify to the complementary roles of orality and literacy in the transmission of knowledge. More recent scholarship has endorsed this view, showing that, in Africa and elsewhere, orality and speech performance interact with literacy and literary skills in more dynamic ways than was commonly assumed (Furniss 2004; Finnegan 2007; Barber 2007a). Even if the so-called 'great divide' between literate and non-literate communities persists in some grand (and rather abstract) social-historical narratives of 'civilization', in actual practice everywhere, speech forms the basis for rhetorical skills. Orality continues to be fundamental to the production and communication of knowledge in all societies, and nowhere has it been simply replaced by literacy. (2) Indeed, neither politics, nor religion, nor intellectual progress can be realized, or imagined, without the direct 'interaction rituals' of face-to-face dialogue (on the latter, see Collins 1998: Chapter 1). The function of language, whether spoken or written, is duly recognized as pivotal to any knowledge economy; (3) but the acting body, too, is integral to the formation, acquisition, expression and continual transformation of knowledge (Marchand 2007). Though propositional and embodied forms of knowledge differ in significant ways (in terms of the cognitive apparatuses that give rise to them and their respective modes of expression), they are nevertheless mutually constitutive and cannot be isolated, one from the other, in studying 'expert' performance or knowledge transmission. Marcel Mauss's seminal contribution (1934) to our understanding of the body as a nexus of social and cultural knowledge, technical skill and habitual activity was most famously elaborated by Bourdieu (1977). Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological studies of the senses and perception likewise designated the body as the locus of human knowledge and experience (1962). …

Abstract: We reflect upon participation in design processes by people who emphasise 'primary orality', or direct, face-to-face, unmediated communication, due to their rural locations in places with low technology ambiance and cultural antecedents. We focus on issues and relationships between rural contexts and primary orality of relevance to our projects with Indigenous people in regional Australia and villagers in remote rural South Africa. We observe dilemmas as we apply methods, which are informed by ethnomethodology, ethnography and Participatory Design, in enabling local participation, such as intrusive recording practices, concerns about power structures and appropriate investment of time.

Abstract: The term “oral traditions” is normally employed by Africanists to denote the field of non-literary or non-written resources. The term occupies the same semantic field as the term “orality” though the second term seems to have arisen in opposition to the implicit valorization of “literacy” in studies of non-industrial cultures and their differences from industrial ones. Orality was then extended to denote a set of conceptual skills which bear the same status as literacy in constituting a sense of cultural identity. In this usage it transcends the past-orientated sense of “oral traditions” to embrace a notion of generalized concepts, symbols, rhetorical capacities, and even unarticulated assumptions whose inspiration is the totality of oral culture. As F. Abiola Irele points out, it is significant also to remember that literary writing in Africa performs an integration of what he terms “aesthetic traditionalism.” Orality in Africa is not just a mode of speech different from writing, but undergirds an entire way of life. More importantly, the traditional esthetic forms that abound within African orality impact upon everyday environments as well as in more formal ritual contexts. The proverb, for example, opens up the “possibilities for mental processes and even cognitive orientation” and “represents a compaction of reflected experience and functions as a kind of minimalism of thought.” African writing takes inspiration from these resources of orality in order to establish a distinctive account of the African world. Most contexts of orality exhibit a high level of polysemy in terms of the materials employed within each genre.

Abstract: The research reported in this paper examined spoken mathematics in particular well-taught classrooms in Australia, China (both Shanghai and Hong Kong), Japan, Korea and the USA from the perspective of the distribution of responsibility for knowledge generation in order to identify similarities and differences in classroom practice and the implicit pedagogical principles that underlie those practices. The methodology of the Learners Perspective Study documented the voicing of mathematical ideas in public discussion and in teacherstudent conversations and the relative priority accorded by different teachers to student oral contributions to classroom activity. Significant differences were identified among the classrooms studied, challenging simplistic characterisations of the Asian classroom as enacting a single pedagogy, and suggesting that, irrespective of cultural similarities, local pedagogies reflect very different assumptions about learning and instruction. We have employed spoken mathematical terms as a form of surrogate variable, possibly indicative of the location of the agency for knowledge generation in the various classrooms studied (but also of interest in itself). The analysis distinguished one classroom from another on the basis of public oral interactivity (the number of utterances in whole class and teacherstudent interactions in each lesson) and mathematical orality (the frequency of occurrence of key mathematical terms in each lesson). Classrooms characterized by high public oral interactivity were not necessarily sites of high mathematical orality. In particular, the results suggest that one characteristic that might be identified with a national norm of practice could be the level of mathematical orality: relatively high mathematical orality characterising the mathematics classes in Shanghai with some consistency, while lessons studied in Seoul and Hong Kong consistently involved much less frequent spoken mathematical terms. The relative contributions of teacher and students to this spoken mathematics provided an indication of how the responsibility for knowledge generation was shared between teacher and student in those classrooms. Specific analysis of the patterns of interaction by which key mathematical terms were introduced or solicited revealed significant differences. It is suggested that the empirical investigation of mathematical orality and its likely connection to the distribution of the responsibility for knowledge generation and to student learning ourcomes are central to the development of any theory of mathematics instruction and learning.

Abstract: The so-called Kumarbi Cycle was not a closed system. To it belonged compositions of different periods and places. The Song of Kumarbi, and perhaps that of Ea and the Beast, were composed in Eastern Syria, under the influence of the Babylonian epic. All the other songs are later, and composed in Western Syria; the Song of KAL/LAMMA had its origin probably in Karkamiš. They had not educational purposes, in the sense that they were not used to train younger scribe. It is argued that they were recited in some religious occasions and fulfilled the common need of narrating and listening. The extensive use of direct speech in such songs responded to the requirements of an oral performance, but does not necessarily reflect techniques of oral composition.

Abstract: In the last thirty years there have been significant developments in the application of orality studies to the Gospels. The objective of this article is to provide an overview of the field through a survey of its leading proponents, including Werner Kelber, Joanna Dewey, Paul Achtemeier, Peter Botha, Richard Horsley and Jonathan Draper, Kenneth Bailey, James Dunn, Richard Bauckham, David Rhoads and Whitney Shiner. The essay begins with a discussion of several foundational studies, before turning specifically to the reconception of orality and the implication of this research for the Gospels. The study concludes that, while an appreciation of orality has made inroads into certain segments of Gospels research, it remains a neglected and underexploited dimension of NT interpretation.

Abstract: Based on the premise that it is not possible to analyze the relation between oral and written language by concentrating only on the linguistic code, this essay considers the totality of discursive production as a social practice and analyzes the contexts of production, the uses and forms of oral and written transmission in daily life. To this end a double distinction is proposed between: (a) orality and literacy as social practices, and (b) speech and writing as modes of use. The first distinction is based on the observation of sociocommunicative reality and the second, on linguistic facts. Several current theoretical tendencies are examined. All perspectives that polarize the relation between oral and written language are rejected, while a position focusing on the multifactorial relati­on between the two practices within a continuum of uses and genres that rejects intrin­sic properties, both negative and positive, of these practices, is adopted.

Abstract: This article examines possible categories that shape narrative, that is, memory and subjectivity in the trajectory of the other. It weaves questions that open new perspectives to interpret narratives on the plane of history and discourse, taking note of their challenges. It analyzes orality and its evolutions in the passage of the individual, particularized account to the artful construction of the collective.

Abstract: Popular romance was one of the most wide-spread forms of literature in the middle ages, yet despite its cultural centrality, and its fundamental importance for later literary developments, the genre has defied precise definition, its subject matter ranging from tales of chivalric adventure, to saintly women, and monsters who become human The essays in this collection seek to provide an inclusive and thorough examination of romance They provide contexts, definitions, and explanations for the genre, particularly in, but not limited to, an English context Topics covered include genre and literary classification; race and ethnicity; gender; orality and performance; the romance and young readers; metre and form; printing culture; and reception CONTRIBUTORS: ROSALIND FIELD, RALUCA L RADULESCU, MALDWYN MILLS, GILLIAN ROGERS, JENNIFER FELLOWS, THOMAS H CROFTS, ROBERT ALLEN ROUSE, JOANNE CHARBONNEAU, DESIREE CROMWELL, AD PUTTER, KARL REICHL, PHILLIPA HARDMAN, CORY JAMES RUSHTON

Abstract: This article investigates the status of orality in the history of technical communication. The article calls for orality as an integral part and driving force of technical writing. The article brings to light the misconceptions that have led to a diminished role of oral communication in technical writing. The article shows the implications of oral skills for improved effectiveness of technical communicators. The article outlines the challenges and promises of teaching oral communication in technical writing.

Abstract: The Lemba in Southern Africa are a specific group with unique traditions regarding Israelite origins. Their oral traditions also contain significant information on the leading role their priestly family played on their journey from the North into the Arabian Peninsula and eventually into Africa. They blazed their trail southwards into Africa as traders, with the ngoma lungundu ("the drum which thunders") playing a very similar role to that of the Ark of the Covenant. Striking parallels between the two traditions as well as a possible link between these two narratives are scrutinised. This study shows how the Lemba have constructed their own set of beliefs around Biblical myths in the context of marginalisation among other African communities. Their oral culture constitutes their world-view and self-understanding or identity. It incorporates the role of oral traditions, history and historiography. One could draw parallels between orality in early Israelite and African religions. The reciprocity between orality and inscripturation of traditions yields valuable information regarding the possible development of traditions in the Old Testament.

Abstract: This article clarifies a perennial problem relating to the concept of ‘orality’ in Gospels studies and attempts to provide some resolution to that problem. Specifically, Gospels criticism has struggled to conceptualize the relation between the Jesus tradition as it was orally performed and early textual (written) expressions of that tradition. The binary opposition ‘literacy/orality’ has failed to provide any help in this conceptualization, and this failure is rooted especially in the rather nebulous (yet widespread) concept of ‘orality’. New Testament scholarship requires a set of culturally specific models of textuality, including the non-communicative functions of written texts and the non-literate use of written traditions. Before we can develop the necessary models, however, we need to deal with the problems we have created by appealing to ‘orality’.

Abstract: This essay discusses the relationship among reading, written and oral language, considering their mixture in the digital world. It calls our attention to the coexistent proceedings apparently exclusives such as reading in the screen as if the reader was reading the newspapers, turning the sheets. In addition it provides a historical review of written language and its changes in the course of human experience. On the other hand, the text comments about the expansion of written uses of language in the digital medium and, at the same time, tells us the results that all of those changes have produced in the written register that became characterized through its vulnerability; in fact it has been observed that there was no submission of digital writing to the norms which try to control it, domesticating its way of expression. If nowadays, reading sustains written language trying to conventionalize it, orality interposes itself between them making human communication more complex and instigating, in the digital world, which has reached inconstant and mutational forms.

Abstract: The book is a cross-disciplinary, multi-genre study of spoken features of language in fiction. It examines not only how oral strategies are used in fictional discourse, but also the functions of those oral strategies. The volume covers a broad range of genres including the novel, autobiography, theatre, cinema, and television. This essay collection contains eight chapters dealing with the representation of orality in writing contributed by different scholars from all over the world. It is an interdisciplinary study of how orality is represented in fictional discourse. The issues addressed here (code-switching and code-mixing, translation, bilingualism, dialect, etc.) are approached from a variety of cultural and intercultural perspectives by the different authors. The variety of topics covered in this volume make it an essential contribution to the fields of Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, Stylistics, and Literary Analysis. The book is aimed at academics, lecturers and students (at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels) of English, Irish, American Studies, Hispanic Studies, Linguistics, Applied Languages, Translation and Film and Media Studies.

Abstract: This thesis investigates a variety of uses of actuality (recorded speech), oral history and folklore (vernacular culture) in radio broadcasting in Britain and Newfoundland (Canada). The broadcasting of vernacular culture will be shown to foster intimate and interactive relationships between broadcasters and audiences. Using a theoretical framework that draws upon the work of communications theorists Harold Innis and Walter Ong, the thesis will explore the (secondary) orality of radio broadcasting, and will consider instances in which the normative unidirectional structure and 'passive' orality of radio has been (and can be) made reciprocal and active through the participation of listeners. The inclusion of 'lay voices' and 'vernacular input' in radio broadcasting will be charted as a measure of the democratization of radio, and in order to demonstrate radio's role in disseminating oral history, promoting dialogue, and building and binding communities. The thesis will predominantly focus on local and regional forms of radio: the BBC Regions in the post-war era; regional radio programming serving the Canadianprovince ofNewfoundland both pre- and post-Confederation (which took place in 1949); and the community radio sector in the UK during the last five years. A common theme of many of the case studies within the thesis will be the role of citizen participation in challenging, transgressing or eroding editorial control, institutional protocols and the linguistic hegemony of radio production. Conversely, close attention will be given to the ways in which editorial control in radio production has circumscribed the self-definition of participants and communities. These case studies will provide evidence with which to investigate the following research question - is the democratization of radio possible through the incorporation of citizen voices or messages within radio production or programming, or is it only possible through changing the medium itself through citizen participation in democratic structures of production, management and ownership?

Abstract: Introduction Vanishingly few purely oral cultures – those that do not even communicate with a literate culture – still exist in the world. There are numerous indigenous cultures with many nonliterate members; there are also myriad modern literate subcultures that preferentially preserve all or some tradition in oral form. Both, however, are embedded to greater or lesser extent in a web of global literate cultures of varying local intensities. Some historians have argued that tradition preserved orally is not valid evidence, while others recognize it as a category of ‘memory’ that has its own rules of resonance. Modernist western archivists, themselves ref lexively literate, sit uneasily in between: charged with supporting the preservation of records of the past, they have until recently adhered to a practice almost exclusively focused on written textual objects. Now they are being confronted with memory modalities that challenge the model of sequential written text as sufficient documentation for all human cultural phenomena. Production of information, oral and written: the ‘orality and literacy’ episteme Although few communities in the early 21st century completely lack some kind of literacy, it is also true that few are completely documented by the written word, or will ever be so. Thus nearly all communities’ communication and recording of memory take place in a mixed environment. The discussion of orality and literacy as modalities for recording and preserving the past has most frequently been focused, somewhat abstractly, on cultures and communities seen as characterized by ‘pure orality’ – that is, communities where no written language is produced at all – or by ‘literacy’ – taken as communities where everyone is literate. Further, this discourse has been connected historically with an orientalist discourse that placed ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ in a family of binary oppositions including ancient–modern, primitive–civilized and inferior–superior, together with an argument that holds that literacy ‘transforms consciousness’ (for the better, of course) (Ong, 1991). Yet the adequacy of this whole approach to ranking the value of written and oral documentation, with its implication that the written word is more accurate or true than the orally transmitted word, has been set aside as historians and anthropologists have turned away from a positivist view of history and culture and have recognized that all literate cultures still retain many oral practices (Olson and Torrance, 1991).

Abstract: This paper explores the auto/biographical, panegyric, and cultural features of the different chants, and particularly that of Otis Hampton, a young African American man, in Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name within the contexts of orality, memory, and the diaspora. The paper also discusses how Otis’s panegyric poem becomes an archaeological artifact needed to probe his memory and ancestry to unravel the mysteries of the ancient and the contemporary cord that links Black Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Finally, the paper considers how this cord foregrounds the infamous triangular slave trade, black consciousness, and resistance both on the continent and in the diaspora.

Abstract: This volume includes 24 studies on comparative culture analysis in the Southeastern-European and Mediterrean area, as practizised in the "Ethnologia europaea" of Leopold Kretzenbacher, giving an idea of the plurality of possible topics and issues of folk culture in history and presence of this oldest part of Europe, which has not yet been really explored by interested readers. In t erms of subjects and methods these studies are partly located beyond the traditional thematical set of folklore studies: theoretical and terminological problems are discussed, cultural history since the late antiquity is involved, theological issues come together with research facts on customs and rites, masques and disguisings, issues of gender studies and sociology af ages are brought together with methodological critics on comparativism of the Victorian school of ethnography, the competitions of tournament are analyzed in historical and functional context as symbols of power and superiority of Venice in the Eastern Mediterrean, folk plays are examined as prefigurating structures of elaborated forms of folk theatre as well as the influences of Byzantine ecclesiastic painting and iconography on orthodox folk culture; other chapters focus on ethnosteretyps, on forms and functions of blood brotherhood (adoptio in fratrem) since late antiquity, the ways of reception of popular reading material throughout the Balkan peninsula since the 16th century are presented. Other studies are dedicated to the formation of religious traditions in West and East, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, to fairy tales between orality and literacy, but also topics like the public display of personal feelings, forms of gestures, figures of demonology, narratives of oral autobiography, etymological and semantic questions are examined and research projects on oral folk literature are presented. One chapter is also dedicated to the ideological use of folklore studies in the nineteenth century. Chapters 15-24 focus more sepcifically on Greece without lacking wider comparative views. The Introduction and the Conclusion, the selected bibliography at the end of the volume and the indices integrate these chapters in a unique perspective. The specific indices allow also a selective use of the volume.

Abstract: Abstract In this chapter, I will look at complexity of language from a functional perspective, taking the full array of linguistic practices into account: There are differences within the various tasks, usually defined by different domains of language practice, and there are differences between the linguistic resources employed to cope with these domains.

Abstract: 1. Elaloro: A Yoruba Indigenous Discourse on Criticism and Interpretation 2. Elaloro and Translation 3. Some Thoughts on Traditional Hausa Aesthetics and Arabic Influence on Yoruba and Hausa Written Traditions in Nigeria 4. Horses of Memory and The Word is an Egg: Osundare's Poetic Voices 5. Cultural Poetics, African Diaspora, and the Global World: Tanure Ojaide's I Want to Dance and Other Poems 6. African Cultural Revival as an Important Message in Death and the King's Horseman and The Lion and the Jewel 7. Language and Culture in an African Adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex 8. Yoruba Egungun: Some Critical Thoughts 9. Traditional Oral Genre in a Muslim Ilorin: Survival Challenges 10. Mamman Shata Katsina and Omoekee Amao Ilorin: Islam, Performance, and Orality