In the Beginning Were the Words: The Apotheosis and Narrative Displacement of the Logos

Abstract

UNTIL QUITE RECENTLY theories of interpretation and philosophies of language tended to be derived from written records. Whichever theories happened to be in vogue-historical criticism, philosophical hermeneutics, modem formalism, synchronic structuralism, or postmodern deconstructionism-they concerned themselves not with language per se, but almost instinctively with textualized language. Signs are not wanting, however, of a concurrent and growing interest in matters of oral composition and performance, speech and rhetoric, discourse and dialogue, and in manifoldly tangled interactions of speech and writing. The bulk of this work has been produced by recent North American scholarship. What comes to mind is the by now well-known trinity of orality-literacy studies: the work of Milman Parry (A. Parry 1971) and Albert B. Lord (1960) on oral compositional processes in the Serbo-Croatian narrative tradition and its implication for the Homeric epics; Eric A. Havelock's explication of Plato's attack on the oral hegemony of the Greek paideia which the philosopher perceived to be an obstacle to -the advancement of thought (1963; 1982); and Walter J. Ong's analysis of the 16th century Ramist disestablishment of the oral world of rhetoric and discourse in favor of a quiescent, visualist logic (1958). Largely, although not exclusively, stimulated by these three classics, a body of scholarship has since developed dedicated to explora-