Abstract: This article suggests a refinement of the link between dislocated constructions and the oral code. The research is based on an investigation of a mixed-medium corpus of contemporary French, including spoken language, journalistic prose and literary fiction. It is shown first that the form and function of dislocations vary according to the level of orality of the voice in which they are found: in particular, the intermediary nature of citations in newspaper articles is emphasised. It is then argued that the strict association of dislocation with the stylistic function of orality should be modified, since conveying orality does not always seem to be the primary motivation for dislocation.

Abstract: In the world history of writing, Japan presents an unusually detailed record of transition to literacy. Extant materials attest to the social, cultural, and political contexts and consequences of the advent of writing and reading, from the earliest appearance of imported artifacts with Chinese inscriptions in the first century BCE, through the production of texts within the Japanese archipelago in the fifth century, to the widespread literacies and the simultaneous rise of a full-fledged state in the late seventh and eighth centuries. David B. Lurie explores the complex processes of adaptation and invention that defined the early Japanese transition from orality to textuality. Drawing on archaeological and archival sources varying in content, style, and medium, this book highlights the diverse modes and uses of writing that coexisted in a variety of configurations among different social groups. It offers new perspectives on the pragmatic contexts and varied natures of multiple simultaneous literacies, the relations between languages and systems of inscription, and the aesthetic dimensions of writing. Lurie's investigation into the textual practices of early Japan illuminates not only the cultural history of East Asia but also the broader comparative history of writing and literacy in the ancient world.

Abstract: Surveying the variety of ways in which written texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were intricately connected in both Greek and Roman state and private religions.

Abstract: In historical sociolinguistics, it is often assumed that ego-documents such as private letters represent the spoken language of the past as closely as possible. In this paper, we will try to determine the degree of orality of seventeenth-century Dutch private letters: the degree to which the spoken local dialect is represented in these texts, and at the same time, the extent to which scribes possibly converged towards supralocal writing systems. We study the orthographical representation of four phonemes in a corpus of letters from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. Clear cases of local writing practices are revealed, contributing to our knowledge of the spoken language in the past, as well as to the different ways in which it was represented in written language. However, the degree to which local features appear in the corpus is remarkably low. Only a minority of the letters contains localizable features, and if a letter contains these, it is usually only in a minority of the positions which, historically, were phonologically possible. We conclude that, in general, scribes did not aim to write their local dialect, but employed an intended supraregional variety instead. Keywords: Historical sociolinguistics; Dutch, seventeenth century; ego-documents; letters; writing systems; historical phonology; language from below; orality

Abstract: Although problems of orality have been much discussed by medievalists, there is to date no comprehensive handbook on this topic In ;Medieval Oral Literature in the ;De Gruyter Lexikon series, an international team of scholars has provided an in-depth discussion both of theoretical issues and various poetic traditions and genres In addition to the core areas of the European Middle Ages, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish traditions have also been included

Abstract: In this article, the author considers “podcasting” in relation to the work of McLuhan and other medium theorists. He then looks at the growing popularity of this new media form as another possible manifestation of Walter Ong’s secondary orality. In the tradition of the town crier, the beat poet, the DJ, and most recently, the blogger, podcasting recasts the personal experience (the “phenomenological feel”) as well as the actual perspectives and preferences accessible to people on the fly via digital storage and playback of audio content. Podcasting certainly seems to blur notions of “public” and “private” in unprecedented ways, and a recent concept dubbed “publicy” (privacy that occurs under the intense acceleration of instantaneous communications) accounts for this. Although the podcast may be the latest and perhaps purest form of publicy, is publicy itself really anything new, or is it just a new form of orality (i.e., secondary orality) that recasts all as witness-participants to the chants and decrees...

Abstract: Contents Preface Notes on Contributors Introduction Elizabeth Minchin Part I Poetry in Performance Chapter 1 The Audience Expects: Penelope and Odysseus Adrian Kelly Chapter 2 The Presentation of Song in Homer's Odyssey Deborah Beck Chapter 3 Comparative Perspectives on the Composition of the Homeric Simile Jonathon Ready Chapter 4 Composing Lines, Performing Acts: Clauses, Discourse Acts, and Melodic Units in a South Slavic Epic Song Anna Bonifazi and David F Elmer Chapter 5 Works and Days as Performance Ruth Scodel Part II Literacy and Orality Chapter 6 Empowering the Sacred: The Function of the Sanskrit Text in a Contemporary Exposition of the Bhagavatapurana McComas Taylor Chapter 7 Prompts for Participation in Early Philosophical Texts James Henderson Collins II Chapter 8 Performing an Academic Talk: Proclus on Hesiod's Works and Days Patrizia Marzillo Chapter 9 The Criticism--and the Practice--of Literacy in the Ancient Philosophical Tradition Mathilde Cambron-Goulet Chapter 10 Reading Books, Talking Culture: The Performance of Paideia in Imperial Greek Literature Jeroen Lauwers Chapter 11 Eumolpus Poeta at Work: Rehearsed Spontaneity in the Satyricon Niall Slater

Abstract: This article first explores individual memory as understood from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to modern-day neurology and psychology. The perspective is correlated with collective memory theory in the works of Halbwachs, Connerton, Gillis, Fentress and Wickham, Olick, Schwartz, Jan and Alida Assmann and Kirk and Thatcher. The relevance of ‘orality’ is highlighted in Kelber’s works, as well as in oral poetry performance by illiterate Yugoslavian bards, as discussed in studies by Parry, Lord and Havelock. Kelber’s challenge of Bultmann’s theory of oral tradition in the gospels is also covered. The article concludes with observations and reflections, opting for a position of moderate−to−strong constructionism.

Abstract: How can one use folk and popular evidence for non-western and non-elite rural social history in periods that are sparsely documented by other forms of evidence? That is, what if oral literature is the majority of what there is? While oral literatures contain a great deal of information for historians, this claim is not necessarily premised on a transparent reading of explicit information in specific works. How might we see processes of written mediation and transmission of (originally) oral literature as providing us with more information, rather than as distorting a primary source? And how might we productively approach heavily stylized lyric genres which provide seemingly little social information? Through the intertwined analysis of rural poetry and biodata related to eastern Afghanistan in the late 1940s and 1950s, provided in a genre of biographical directory called tazkira , I argue for a dynamic reading of popular literatures as documentary evidence and as political weapons that were designed to create social change and catalyze new types of political awareness. I argue that the historian’s attention to changes in literary genres and changing construals of the “ideal addressee” in these texts can illuminate social change.

Abstract: The podcast is a unique configuration of IText precisely because it foregrounds sound in the current cultural moment of secondary orality. This return to an oral—aural tradition offers several unique benefits. Podcasts adapt well to today’s unstructured work spaces. Moreover, podcasts blur boundaries between virtual and face-to-face communication and virtual and physical spaces. Finally, podcasts are fragmented, reflecting the fluidity of previous ITexts; yet, unlike ITexts, podcasts mostly exist as complete, scripted texts. This article raises questions concerning what the podcast contributes to overall knowledge of how texts are mediated through evolving information technologies.

Abstract: In this paper, the author investigates the complex relation between orality and literacy by analyzing a set of magical papyri that quote disconnected and seemingly out of context Homeric verses. This set is generally referred to as the homeromanteion , the 'Homer oracle,' and can be dated around the fourth or fifth century century CE. The author also discusses the homeromanteion by first looking at instances where Homeric verses are quoted in a larger narrative in contexts of divination. It is also important to compare the Homeric lines in the homeromanteion with the use of Homer for ritual purposes elsewhere in the magical papyri. The author then compares this compilation of lines with similar sortes and other divination practices and propose a reading of the homeromanteion as a full manual and document in its own right, at the same time attempting to explain why these verses were included in it. Keywords: divination; Greek; Homer; homeromanteion ; magical papyri; prophet; sortes ; tradition

Abstract: The paper focuses on the representation of pedagogical and political communication between (and around) Plato, Dion and Dionysius II in Plutarch's Life of Dion. Plutarch's narrative invokes both the Platonic critique of writing as an inadequate medium for teaching philosophy, and the polarity between free oral speech and writing as a symptom of tyranny. It is argued that the Life espouses but also complicates and implicitly interrogates the opposition between writtenness and orality across the philosophical and the political domain, thus constituting a rich intertextual response, from an Imperial Platonist author, to the Platonic concerns about the written word.

Abstract: The issue of orality and the interplay between the oral and the written have long been an ‘academic backwater’ in the study of medieval Persian literature.1 There were mainly two reasons for this: (1) the choice of subject-matter for scholarly research has all too often been guided by evaluative aesthetic criteria, restricting it to the study of acknowledged masterpieces and leaving out whole layers of medieval literary production which might offer themselves most opportunely to inquiry from the viewpoint of orality, such as, for example, folk prose literature; (2) there has been a reluctance to make use of theoretical tools and approaches developed on the basis of inquiry into similar issues in Western literatures. In the last two decades, however, the problem of the interdependence of oral and written traditions has received growing attention, first of all in the context of Shāh-nāma studies. The Shāh-nāma (The Book of Kings) of Abū al-Qāsim Firdausī (d. c. 1020) is a vast epic poem, whose current standard edition includes over 50,000 rhymed couplets (Khāliqī–Mut. laq 1988–2008). The epic spans Iranian history from the mythical Gayōmart, the First Man, to the fall of the historical Sasanian dynasty as a result of the Arab conquest in the seventh century, and is thus considered the national epos of Iran.2 The other focal point for studying orality in medieval Persian literature has become the Persian dāstān. Dāstāns are capacious fictional prose narratives with branching plots, which relate the heroic-romantic adventures of their eponymous heroes, often with a religious, Islamic emphasis. Their composition and transmission are connected with the institution of professional or semiprofessional storytellers, who at different historical periods were known as muh. addithūn, qis .s .a-kh ānān, and, more recently, since about the Safavid period (sixteenth century onwards), as naqqālān.3 Lacking a strict genre definition, dāstāns were variously referred to by their authors as ‘tale, story’ (dāstān, rivāyat, h. ikāyat or qis .s .a) or ‘book’ (kitāb). In research literature they are defined as folk stories (dāstān-hā–yi ‘āmmiyāna),4 as narodnye dastany( Borshevskiy 1963:10–11), popular romances (Hanaway 1970: 7, and 1971), or as heroic novels (romanhāi pahlavāni) (Salimov 1971: 14–15). The writing down of the dāstāns most probably began in the eleventh century; the tradition of their composition survived till the second half of the

Abstract: The article examines ways in which the views of biblical scholars as to the transmission of early Christian traditions, especially the Jesus traditions, have been revolutionized by so-called orality/literacy studies since Werner Kelber’s seminal The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983). In the 2000s, an important turn in the study of orality and literacy in early Christianity took place with the discovery of memory. This has given rise to a focus on theories of collective memory and more recently on the cognitive aspects of individual memory, producing fresh new insights into the close intertwining of orality and literacy in ancient literary activity. The last part of the article brings up the role of ritual in the transmission of early Christian traditions, an aspect that has received less attention in the discussion. For purposes of further analysis, three perspectives on the role of ritual in the study of orality and textuality in early Christianity are highlighted and elaborated. The first underscores the need for a fresh analysis of the numerous liturgical passages in the New Testament identified by the generation of form critics. The second focuses on oral-aural (‘liturgical’) aspects of early Christian literature as part of the larger phenomenon of Greco-Roman literary culture, in which literacy was defined by public performance and recitation to a degree that differs substantially from the modern use of printed books. The last perspective highlights the important question of ritual’s capacity to function as an instrument of religious teaching and doctrinal consolidation.

Abstract: There is a structural/genetic continuity between everyday oral narrative and elaborate literary narratives, with listeners gradually becoming an audience. Literary stories which narrate some character's oral narrating keep us aware of this continuity, and build bridges between advanced literate and oral forms, reappropriating orality for literature, and constructing advanced interactional forms precisely through a return, with a difference, to the origins of narrative interaction. The paper examines some aspects of oral narration in written fiction, and suggests the general proposition that retelling is a crucial concept in narrative analysis, as narratives always retell earlier narratives.

Abstract: Cree poet Louise Bernice Halfe/Sky Dancer informs readers of her book-length poem Blue Marrow that the writing was guided by powerful spectral presences: “The prairie is full of bones. The bones stand and sing and I feel the weight of them as they guide my fingers on this page”. For Halfe’s persona, however, the haunting is doubled, reciprocal, because she both invokes the kôhkomak, the Grandmothers, whose bones sing to her, urging, “Haunt us / with your cries” (2, 73), and indicates her spirit is preoccupied with the Grandmothers’ narratives:

Abstract: The article focuses on the potential help of orality and oral theology in the advancement of Christian missions around the world. The author explores the role of oral theology in the delivery of theological education, particularly in areas where oral cultures dominate. He adds that the entire Christian community should start to consider oral theology as a method of spreading Christianity and connecting with God.

Abstract: Much scholarly work has been done already concerning the oral- traditional aspects of Beowulf; as the only Old Germanic heroic epic to come down to us almost complete, and as a fairly lengthy work containing recognizable formulas, it would seem to be the most likely candidate among compositions of its period for the detection of residual oral influences. Francis Magoun and others have discovered and touted various kinds of oral formulas in it (Magoun 446–67; Foley 204–39; Amodio 63–77; see also Orchard 85–99), while Jeff Opland has examined depictions of oral performances in the poem (192–207; see also Niles 31–32, 120–45). The giants’ sword hilt, looted from the sea cave of the Grendel family, has been put forward as a representation of a clash of literate and oral tradition, with several variant arguments concerning the supposed orality or literacy of Beowulf (e.g., Lerer 169–81; Near 320, 329). Nevertheless, turning the tables on supposed orality, or “oral thinking,” and examining instances of seeing in the poem produce some surprising results. Grendel’s mother, who unlike her son might be imagined to be literate because she has a text hanging on the wall of her lair 1 (1557–62, 1687–98a; Acker 708–9; Near 323–25), never explicitly uses her sense of sight in the course of the poem. Grendel uses his sense of sight only once, though this instance is both elaborately described and extensively quoted in critical works as particularly demonstrative of his monstrous nature: during his last attack on the Danes, he enters the hall of Heorot with a fiery gleam in his eyes, sees the many warriors lying before him, and his mind laughs with joy at the prospect of a luxuriant feed upon human corpses (726b–34). During the section of Beowulf concerning Gr endel’s mother, on the other hand, she simply onfunde, “discovered” Beowulf as an invader in her mere (1498a): many translations translate the term with something like “sensed” (Heaney, line 1499); it is possible that she does not see him at all. To complete this pattern of diminishing emphasis upon powers of seeing for the monsters, the dragon searches (2287–88a, 2293b–95) but never explicitly sees anything during Beowulf ’s description of this monster in the text as we have it—not even during the dragon fight,

Abstract: In "Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England, " Lori Ann Garner illuminates the idiomatic and traditional meanings invested in depictions of architecture within the vernacular verse of early medieval England, portrayals that consistently demonstrate a shared aesthetic between literary texts and physical buildings. Through systematic exploration of the period's verbal and material culture as complementary art forms, Garner argues that in Anglo-Saxon England the arts of poetry and building emerged from the same cultural matrix. Not only did Anglo-Saxon builders and poets draw demonstrably from many of the same traditionally encoded motifs and images, but so rhetorically powerful was the period's architectural poetics that its expressive force continued in literature and architecture produced long after the Norman Conquest.Far from conceiving this inherited tradition as monolithic in nature, "Structuring Spaces" foregrounds the complex interface of orality and literacy as a nexus of varied and multivalent cultural traditions that influenced the production of texts and buildings alike. After establishing a model of architectural poetics based on oral theory and vernacular architecture, Garner explores fictionalized buildings in such works as "Beowulf" and the "Ruin," architectural representation in Old English adaptations of Greek and Latin works, uses of architectural metaphor, and themes of buildings in Anglo-Saxon maxims, riddles, elegies, hagiographies, and charms. Her book draws on scholarship from art history, archaeology, anthropology, and architecture, as well as the great wealth of studies addressing the literature itself."Detailing the deeply interconnected relationship of Anglo-Saxon oral poetics and the architectonics of constructed space in the period, Lori Garner's "Structuring Spaces" makes a significant contribution. Her ability to put the material culture of the period, despite the truly fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence, into a direct and mutually illuminating dialogue with the discourse of oral poetics is very impressive and of considerable value to scholars in the several fields of medieval literature, medieval architecture, and oral theory." --Mark C. Amodio, Vassar College"In this wide-ranging and lavishly-illustrated study, Lori Garner effectively aligns the established approach of oral poetics with insights from the emerging field of vernacular architecture. From Heorot to Grendel's mere, from the Mermedonian prison of "Andreas" to the nest of "The Phoenix," from the Wife's earth-hall to Holofernes' tent, Garner's sensitive readings of the poetics of built spaces in Old English poetry open up new perspectives on "conventional" imagery that we only thought we knew how to read." --Charles D. Wright, University of Illinois"

Abstract: I can claim no direct pedigree from African Studies at Wisconsin, but one of my own graduate school mentors, Robert Harms, benefitted from David Henige's and Jan Vansina's influence; all three have profoundly marked my own approaches to the historical anthropology of equatorial Africa. In this paper I draw on David Henige's illuminating and still relevant insights into the problem of “feedback,” in light of a key methodological preoccupation in my own discipline of anthropology – “fieldwork.” In particular I want to suggest how ethnographic fields are formed over time through a layering process that involves ongoing cycles of intertwined oral and written traditions.Henige's 1973 article, “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition,” prefigures by a full decade Terence Ranger's highly influential essay on “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa.” In that 1973 article, Henige argued that given traditions were “dynamic over time.” British Indirect Rule had led the Fante of the Gold Coast to devise new oral traditions in order to take advantage of opportunities of British Colonialism. In particular, he cites the ways printed sources, especially the Bible, but also the Qur'an, colonial sources, publications, and later scholarly works, have all found their way back into oral accounts. Henige also suggests that pre-colonial oral traditions also would have been continually reworked; present practices suggest considerable adaptability and flexibility in the past.

Abstract: this informative and wide-ranging study by James Maxey (now with the Nida institute for Biblical Scholarship) presents a “new paradigm” for Bible translation in the twenty-first century. What then is so “new” about this proposal? To my mind, it is the author’s thoroughgoing treatment of the subject of orality—that is, an oralaural focus that begins with the original composition of Bible texts in the Ancient Near eastern world and also ends in the medium of sound, whereby most people access the Scriptures even today. Past translation theorists and practitioners alike have not followed this essential dynamic of communication from start to finish as closely and consistently as Maxey has, so this is a very welcome and much needed contribution to the field. By grounding his investigation in the vital orality of the text—as initially generated, and then transmitted, translated, and ultimately performed—Maxey has also seen the importance of dealing with the total communication context as another essential aspect of the overall process. thus, any effort to translate the Scriptures must be carefully and completely “contextualized” in two directions—first of all, in the exegesis of a particular text in its original historical and sociocultural setting, and then also in the re-expression of that same text in another language-culture and within the context of a specific “host community” today. Where human societies are thus engaged in any joint communication venture, verbal and/or nonverbal, the issues of interpersonal power and solidarity also arise, along with the associated factors of ideology, cultural identity, ethnic pride, negotiated meaning, and the various interrelated media of message transmission. these are some of the major intertwined topics that Maxey discusses in well-documented detail in this insightful monograph. in an introductory chapter, Maxey orients readers to some of the chief problems that came to light as he carried out work as a mission translation specialist among the Vuté people of cameroon in the 1990s. these issues gave him the motivation to explore more fully the subject of Bible translation, from the oral genesis of the original text to its ideal vernacular expression in some form of communal oral performance. Among the problematic factors that he noted in the established church was a general lack of appreciation for the highly contextualized oral art forms and performances of the Vuté community, in contrast to the great social importance of these public communication events. coupled with this was an inadequate methodology of translation in relation to both theory (i.e., a textfocused “code model” of communication) and practice, the latter due to a general policy that gave precedence to literacy and literature in print. Maxey came to the conclusion that in order to find a viable solution to the various inadequacies that he observed, a manifold interdisciplinary, inculturated, community-based, and performance-oriented approach was needed.

Abstract: In his book The Lost Senses: Deafness and Blindness (1845), deaf (1 British writer and missionary John Kitto declares that deaf people cannot write poetry. Kitto argues, "For want of hearing others speak, it is next to impossible that [a deaf person] should have that knowledge of quantity and rhyme which is essential to harmonious verse." (2) However, after explaining this personal disqualification, Kitto provides specimens of his own verse to demonstrate his attempt at "the tuneful art" (1:171). Kitto suggests that "if the reader can discover the formal errors-the bad rhymes--the halting, hopping, stumping feet-which I am unable to detect, then my proposition is demonstrated; but if he can make no such discoveries, it must then be admitted with some qualification" (1:171). While Kitto's poetry provides evidence of his poetic ability, his preface exposes his anxieties about writing in a genre that he believed required the ability to hear. Kitto's strange vacillation between declaring the impossibility of a deaf poet and demonstrating the viability of his own poetry reflects the complicated position inhabited by a nineteenth-century deaf poet writing in English. Kitto, like all other nineteenth-century poets, both hearing and deaf, was facing a cultural climate that linked written poetry with orality, especially in terms of formal features including rhythm and rhyme. Kitto was not the only deaf poet who felt ambivalent about participating in a genre tied to sound and speech: about a dozen American and British deaf poets, who used signed languages or fingerspelling to communicate, published one or more volumes of work during the Victorian period. These deaf poets often acknowledged that their position was contradictory in a cultural paradigm that invested poetry with a special relationship to aurality and orality. This essay will investigate how these nineteenth-century deaf poets balanced cultural beliefs about the primacy of sound to poetry with their own desire to sever hearing ability from poetic ability and will explore what this tension reveals about nineteenth-century perceptions of the relation between sound and poetry. By considering both the formal conventionalism and the thematic radicalism of their constructions of sound in poetry, I will argue that these poets mobilized the tension between sound and deafness. This essay will posit that nineteenth-century deaf poets ambivalently maintained an idea of "vocality" in their poetry while underscoring how that imagined "voice" was a silent construct of print. My argument about nineteenth-century deaf poetry also intervenes in contemporary critical conversations about sound in poetry because deaf poetry disrupts any model of poetry that imagines sound as essential to poetic craft and consumption. Despite the potential barriers to deaf poetic production, poetry was a valued element of nineteenth-century deaf culture. Important events in the deaf community, including deaf school graduations, for instance, were commemorated with poems written and signed by pupils. (3) Furthermore, the vast network of periodicals created by and for deaf people, including the widely circulated deaf school newspapers known as the Little Paper Family, (4) published poetry by deaf writers in monthly poetry columns. The nineteenth-century poets I will examine were all heavily involved with this culture of deaf poetry. They constitute what I will propose is the canon of nineteenth-century deaf poetry in English from the 1830s to the 1890s. While these poets had diverse class, gender, national, racial, educational, audiological, and historical experiences, in this essay I focus on the one important quality they shared: a concern that their deafness might preclude poetic achievement. (5) For example, early poets like Kitto (1804-1854) (6) and American poets John Burnet (1808-1874) (7) and James Nack (1809-1879) (8) did not have deaf forebears to validate their desire to write poetry. …