Details

Subject(s)

• Oral tradition [Browse]
• Poetics [Browse]
• Orality in literature [Browse]
• Storytelling [Browse]
• Folk literature—History and criticism [Browse]

Series

• Verbal arts--studies in poetics [More in this series]
• Verbal arts: studies in poetics

Summary note

• "Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the "device"--Core ideas of modern literary theory-were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts-starting with Homer and the Bible-had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian "techniques of the body" as belonging to the domain of Derridean "arche-writing," Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices"-- Provided by publisher.
• "A history of the concept of orality (that is, the creation and transmission of literary works without the use of writing), this book shows awareness of this medium emerging from the encounter of many literary and scientific developments (romanticism, post-symbolism, structuralism; physiology, psychology, the study of expression, anthropology; phonography, cinema)"-- Provided by publisher.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-245) and index.

Contents

• Introduction: Weighing Hearsay
• Poetry Without Poems or Poets
• Writing as One Form of Notation
• Autography
• The Human Gramophone
• Embodiment and Inscription.

Show 3 more Contents items

ISBN

• 9780823270460 ((hardcover))
• 0823270467 ((hardcover))
• 9780823270477 ((paperback))
• 0823270475 ((paperback))

LCCN

2015036361

OCLC

914326210

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