Quotation in the Constitution of Yoruba Oral Texts

Abstract

Any genre of verbal art, or any single instance of a genre, can be understood in terms of the way it is constituted as text. Research on oral verbal art usually proceeds by collecting a number of examples of a recognized, named genre (a particular kind of poem, song, dirge, chant, tale) and then examining them for the "characteristic features" they share. But the analysis should not stop there. We need to presume that textuality itself is culturally specific: that there are different ways of being "text," and that genres recognized as distinct within a given cultural field may nevertheless share a common textuality. To grasp the specific aesthetic mode of any verbal art, then, we need to understand how it is marked, and constituted, as text. To develop this argument, I find it necessary to take issue with the prevailing emphasis on oral art as defined exclusively by performance.