Abstract: Central to understanding the prophecy and prayer of the Hebrew Bible are the unspoken assumptions that shaped them—their genres. Modern scholars describe these works as “poetry,” but there was no corresponding ancient Hebrew term or concept. Scholars also typically assume it began as “oral literature,” a concept based more in evolutionist assumptions than evidence. Is biblical poetry a purely modern fiction, or is there a more fundamental reason why its definition escapes us? Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms changes the debate by showing how biblical poetry has worked as a mirror, reflecting each era’s own self-image of verbal art. Yet Vayntrub also shows that this problem is rooted in a crucial pattern within the Bible itself: the texts we recognize as “poetry” are framed as powerful and ancient verbal performances, dramatic speeches from the past. The Bible’s creators presented what we call poetry in terms of their own image of the ancient and the oral, and understanding their native theories of Hebrew verbal art gives us a new basis to rethink our own.

Abstract: A primary mode for the creation and dissemination of poetry in Renaissance Italy was the oral practice of singing and improvising verse to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Singing to the Lyre is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous practice, which was cultivated by performers ranging from popes, princes, and many artists, to professionals of both mercantile and humanist background. Common to all was a strong degree of mixed orality based on a synergy between writing and the oral operations of memory, improvisation, and performance. As a cultural practice deeply rooted in language and supported by ancient precedent, cantare ad lyram (singing to the lyre) is also a reflection of Renaissance cultural priorities, including the status of vernacular poetry, the study and practice of rhetoric, the oral foundations of humanist education, and the performative culture of the courts reflected in theatrical presentations and Castiglione's Il cortegiano.

Abstract: This essay explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired deep experience with written literature in the early Greek world. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the intensive study of certain written texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an enduring and important connection between economic capital and cultural capital acquired through reading and performing poetry. It was in the Classical period, if not before, that the interconnected practices of literate education and literary reading acquired their distinctive social character. Fully understanding the complex interface between orality and literacy in the early Greek world entails understanding some highly literate subcultures on their own terms.

Abstract: This paper explores the use of non-quotational direct speech – a construction displaying deictic perspective persistence – in the Hebrew Bible, an ancient text of great cultural significance. We focus on the use of non-quotational direct speech to introduce intentions, hopes, motives, or states of affairs. Special emphasis is laid on the complementizer lemor, grammaticalized from a speaking verb, which introduces the import of an action through direct speech. We claim that such fictive speech is grounded in face-to-face conversation as conceptual model or frame. Beyond the Hebrew Bible itself, we discuss possible extended implications that our findings have for the link between grammatical structures conventionally associated with perspective shift and orality, as well as possible links between the conceptual frame of situated interaction and the notion of linguistic meaning. Ultimately, we hope to advance the view that grammar and discourse are inherently conversational and thus viewpointed in nature.

Abstract: This article critically reflects on the overwhelming presence of literary texts in French diachronic linguistics, especially concerning medieval discourse markers and orality. After an attempt to linguistically define orality markers and to distinguish them from discourse markers, the question of why 'practical' non-literary documents (such as parliamentary records, trials or remission letters) have received little attention in linguistics will be discussed. We will then briefly present some of these documents, which could be studied together with literary texts, pointing out interesting meta-linguistic (status of swear-words, reception of these documents) and linguistic (pragmatic use of coordinators, 'oral' syntactic phenomena) aspects. This paper does not to seek to criticize prior studies on medieval orality in literature but rather to review the various sources available for the examination of medieval orality as well as to suggest new ways to deal with the problem of data.

Abstract: The position of the love letter in the novel Di Bawah Lindungan Ka'bah by Hamka (1st/1938 print, 31st/2010 print) with the same film directed by Hanny J. Saputra (2011) is very different and shows the multimedia sensibility that keeps track meaning within the frame of space and time. Therefore, in studying it used the orality and literacy paradigm and vehicle transfer. The method used is comparative literature. As a result, letters that translate literacy become central in novels because letters are in the same position as novels in written or literary traditions, so that exploration of letters goes hand in hand with the objective conditions of the text and the articulation of supporting media in maximizing the message to be conveyed. Meanwhile, in transferring to films, letters metamorphose into devices with different functions and forms, because their position becomes melting with new media sensibilities that emphasize audio-visual, so that the mentality is built up in the nuances of oralities. Love letters in novels as a link between two people's feelings, while in film, it is only an ornament to accompany rides and adaptations from novels to films, and the awareness that is built is a mentality of freedom that depends on memory, so it is called the second or secondary orality.

Abstract: Western ideologies of literacy continue to affect outsiders’ understanding of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. The acquisition of print literacy and even the Christian beliefs of the ma...

Abstract: Literary histories are acts of synthesis, classification, evaluation, and ordering that are also often heavily invested in both nostalgia and ideology. The main challenge of a literary history is t...

Abstract: This article deals with discourse markers in various types of literature originating from the 14th and 15th century. It is based on a historical-pragmatic perspective, focusing on speech-like texts and seeking to determine their degrees of orality. The corpus-based study compares the use of discourse markers in medieval trials, mystery play texts, chansons de geste and their prose versions. The study demonstrates great variation of discourse markers across texts regarding frequency of occurrence, values and usage according to the literary genre. Dialogic genres show more variety of discourse markers than epic stories and prose fiction. Moreover, some discourse markers that can only be found in drama comedies are still used as discourse markers in modern French. Their presence is closely related to the interactional context. Finally, orality is differently represented in different genres of medieval texts. Each of these representations pertains to a specific literary genre and various degrees of orality can be identified.

Abstract: In this article, I analyse the orality of a sixteenth-century Spanish literary text, the Retrato de la Locana andaluza (RLA), composed in Rome (1524) by the Andalusian priest Francisco Delicado. This work reflects the multilingual situation of Rome during that time and is also an example of a text specifically designed to be read aloud in public. The following hypothesis has been proved: the RLA is a remarkable example of a text written in sixteenth-century Spanish that can be used for studying both medial and conceptional orality (as defined by Koch and Oesterreicher 2007). The text of the only surviving antique copy of this book was consciously written taking into account its way of dissemination: public reading (aloud in groups). Furthermore, Delicado uses features of the spoken language to portray characters and communicative situations, and to imitate the mechanisms and strategies of oral dialogicity.

Abstract: The play of the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles is the most famous story of Oedipus. However, similar stories have been told before and thereafter throughout history as legends and folk t...

Abstract: The article reviews the book by Andrzej M. Gieniusz, CR, “Inesperto nell'arte di parlare”? (2 Cor 11, 6). Retorica al servizio del Vangelo (Percorsi culturali 25; Roma: Urbaniana University Press 2018). The author begins by discussing the publication in detail, and then proceeds to the specific issues related to it. These include Rom 7:1-6 read as transitio, Rom 8:12 as the test case of orality and literacy in Paul, the category of “religious experience” in Paul, the apocalyptic background of Paul’s attitude toward work, and the role of 1 Cor 15:8 in constructing the apostle’s ethos. The main characteristic of the book by Prof. Gieniusz is a creative combination of rhetoric and theology, discussed in the last part of the article. The book shows how to do theology focused on the newness of the Christian life, the primacy of grace and the uniqueness of Christ’s way (solus Christus).

Abstract: The language-learning texts of the early modern period were intimately concerned with questions of orality and the sound of speech. This essay begins by looking at methods of representing and teaching pronunciation in vernacular language manuals of the period from 1480 to 1715, to see how authors attempted to bridge the gap between print and speech, and how readers modified their manuals to make them more usable in oral contexts. Recognizing, as early modern authors and teachers did, that there is a limit to print's ability to communicate the sound of speech, this essay then unpicks the new reading practices that activated the oral materials found in these manuals. Lastly, it shows how in an increasingly competitive educational market, manuals came to stand for the voices of their authors and to make claims for their pedagogical authority that were vocal in every sense.

Abstract: In this paper we will examine the setting up of the Reading, Writing and Orality Center (cleo) at University of Antioquia (UdeA) as a device through which this Colombian public university is seeking to strengthen academic literacy practices and supporting successful graduation processes. This Center relies upon contributions from Literacy and Academic Literacy Studies. In presenting this pedagogical experience, we aim to present an overview of the Center, and to analyze the workings of three educational-pedagogical strategies on which the work of cleo is based, its approaches and design, and its impact in differ-ent university community actors (teachers, students, and administrative staff ). This will help us discuss and reflect upon the role of language in academic life. Additionally, we will show how these strategies contribute in different ways to university students’ formation. We also we point out that this Center might be a part of a second generation of Reading and Writing Centers, since it pluralizes its language approach and addresses intercultural perspectives, including study-ing orality in its manifold and varied occurrences.

Abstract: One of the most striking features of the music of samba schools, the samba-enredo, is its high degree of formularity, manifested in the works of many composers from diverse epochs and stylistic tendencies. In this article, I intend to relate this phenomenon to the popular (oral) conscience model that still exists in the samba schools, and also to the fact that samba-enredo is embedded in a capitalist logic that ranges from the cultural industry in which it takes part to how works are chosen for performance in Carnival

Abstract: African literature is a form of literature that originates from Africa and deals on African issues. It is mostly told by Africans or those who have indebt knowledge about African cultures, traditions, values and literary styles. Orature on the other hand is a type of African literature that imbeds all the unique African mode of narrative and in the pre-colonial era, it was a literature performed orally with the help of an oral artist and the presence of an audience. This paper using the evaluative method of analysis critically questions the deviation and loss of true African literature to a western African literature. It goes further to suggest that literary works embellished with African salts of writing should be appreciated and commended and should not be seen as inferior works as it greatly contributes to advancement of Africa’s ideologies and identities in our world that is constantly changing.

Abstract: In this article Mario Frendo engages with the idea of ancient Greek tragedy as a performance phenomenon, questioning critiques that approach it exclusively via literary–dramatic methodologies. Based on the premise that ancient Greek tragedy developed within the predominantly oral context of fifth-century BCE Greece, he draws on Hans-Thies Lehmann's study of tragedy and its relation to dramatic theatre, where it is argued that the genre is essentially ‘predramatic’. Considered as such, ancient Greek tragedy cannot be fully investigated using dramatic theories developed since early modernity. In view of this, Walter J. Ong's caution with respect to the rational processes produced by generations of literate culture will be acknowledged and alternative critiques sought, including performance criticism and performance-oriented frameworks such as orality, via which Frendo traces possible critical trajectories that would allow contemporary scholarship to deal with ancient tragedy as a performance rather than literary phenomenon. Reference will be made to Aristotle's use of the term ‘poetry’, and how performance criticism may provide new insight into how the Poetics deals with one of the earliest performance phenomena in the West. Mario Frendo is lecturer of theatre and performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is director of CaP, a research group focusing on links between culture and performance. His research interests include musicality in theatre, ancient tragedy, and relations between philosophical thought and performance.

Abstract: Critical commentary on the work of British oral historian Tony Parker has concentrated on his contributions to criminology in the ten books based on interviews with offenders that began with The Co

Abstract: Judeo-Spanish and Spanglish are language varieties of minoritized communities at the geographic and cultural edges of the Spanish-speaking world. Literature is being published in both varieties as a way of carving out a space for the speakers of these varieties in societies (the US and Israel for the most part) that value linguistic homogeneity as a national unifying force. This paper grapples with two challenges that emerge when translating literature motivated by such political motivations into English: 1) translating hybridity and 2) orality. It then goes on to explore a few strategies that I have applied to some translations in an effort to address these challenges. The readers of American English translations have been taught to believe in nation-based categorizations of identity that, while they may be useful in many cases, do not accurately describe the “hybrid” contexts whence these source texts emerged. Similarly, orality is ever-present in language varieties that have been rarely written. Recognizing that a translation strategy for such literature must strive to respond to the cultural realities of both the source and target culture, this paper proposes two strategies that attempt to bring this hybridity and orality to an English reader.

Abstract: A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Literature of Chuka University.

Abstract: In 1989, I began an undertaking to revive the nearly-extinct Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta tradition, the centuries-old Gur-Sikh heritage. I located vidyādhārīs (knowledgeable memory bearers) who remembe...

Abstract: After recalling the main empirical evidence in favour of sound symbolism, this Introduction presents the contributions offered by the authors of this issue of Signifiances (Signifying). It then addresses some of the epistemological and metaphysical issues that a full integration of sound symbolism into language theory entails, particularly concerning the relationship between language and reality, and between nature and culture. Finally, it proposes to explain the centuries-old preference of scholars for the arbitrariness of the sign as an effect of the pre-eminent role that writing on paper has played in their pragmatic-cognitive experience of language up to the digital revolution.

Abstract: On the basis of a perspective that fosters dialogue among psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, ethnology, and anthropology, the article reflects on Western morality's tendency to deny the ambivalence of drive. This perspective questions both the demonizing abstraction of aggressiveness, hatred, and death and the desubstantialized idealization of sex, love, and life. Thus, it facilitates an appreciation of ambivalence that allows us to think ourselves as both mortal and mortiferous and also brings us face to face with some updated aspects of the old feeling of guilt that are related to orality. The repudiation of ambivalence is but one aspect of the alleged theological or “rational” renunciation of passions and of culture.

Abstract: The Indian graphic novel’s investment in the written word makes it a politically and socially ambiguous representational enterprise. The continued prevalence of illiteracy in India, especially amon...

Abstract: In this paper, a methodological issue is considered concerning the corpus of texts bearing witness to “spoken Latin”. Within this corpus there are also some texts that have been neglected up until now, stemming from shorthand records of spoken utterances: all of them — either dialogal or monologal — share a conversational allure, that allows the singling out of both universal and historical features of spoken (late) Latin. One of these texts, the Gesta concilii Aquileiensis, is then examined: the shorthand report of a Church council summoned in AD 381, where a lively debate is recorded among bishops supporting opposite views — Catholic vs. Arian — of the divinity of Christ. The survey on the universal traits of orality surfacing in the Gesta focuses on the textual-pragmatic, the syntactic and the semantic levels. It leads to interesting results, concerning above all syntax (prominence of parataxis, and of descendent order of the phrasal constituents within the complex sentence, i.e. independent clause > dependent clause) and semantics (lack of lexical innovation; inclination for expressive words). Despite the undeniably formal — and sometimes even formulaic — character of the dialogue, I would argue that the Gesta allow us to listen as it were to the voices of a group of cultured bishops animatedly discussing subtle theological matters.

Abstract: The primary purpose of sending persons to school is to equip the learners with skills of oracy and literacy as effective expression of issues. Literary studies have been more concerned with how to create and interpret a text, written or oral. As Ong (1977) points out it is strange that persons interested in writing and reading processes like structuralist and phenomenological analysts of textuality, have done little to enlarge understanding of these processes by contrasting writing and reading processes in depth with oral and oral-aural processes. The study, “Performance of Ateso Oral Narratives”, was carried out in some selected communities of Ateso speakers in Uganda and Kenya ethnographically and analysed qualitatively. Research has shown that the problem with much of pedagogical stylistics so far is that it has concentrated on spotting and interpreting textual patterns with little, if any, regard to the reader’s feelings (Oatley, 2004; Miall, 2006). The study recommended that paradigms of orality and writing should to be integrated in the visualizing a bright future of communication for African communities.