Question Of Orality Research Articles

The Sacred Art of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature

The Sacred Art of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature

O desenvolvimento da habilidade oral através do uso de tecnologias digitais: uma revisão sistemática

The present article consists of a qualitative, descriptive-interpretative systematic review, whose objectives are (1) to present which teaching-learning approaches are most used in the development of oral skills through digital technologies; (2) investigate which tools are the most used to develop oral skills in digital environment; (3) what aspects of orality are being the most studied and (4) what possibilities and restrictions are indicated. We analyzed 56 papers, among articles, dissertations and thesis collected from three databases. The implications of this work also point to research gaps in the area, such as the absence of studies on critical perspectives in the work with technology and orality, and the lack of research that deals with the question of orality via ICT in the initial and continuing training of LE teachers.

Orality and Politics in Latin America: Thresholds of Illiteracy

Orality and Politics in Latin AmericaThresholds of Illiteracy Abraham Acosta (bio) Of the many longstanding debates taking place in contemporary Latin American thought, the question of cultural difference (from the West), as well as the semiological nature of that difference, remains one of the most pivotal and politically entrenched. Indeed, the last 20 years has seen the publication of a wealth of material dedicated to studying the emergence, form, and representation of indigenous speech and language within various cultural practices and emplotments, from the colonial era to the present.1 Generally, these debates have turned on the category of orality as the name for, and the means by which to conceptualize, the formal, political, and aesthetic properties of indigenous language and its relationship to Western, lettered writing. Indeed, the question of orality has come to feature prominently in discussions that aim to reconfigure the narrative of the clash between Amerindian [End Page 203] and European cultural spheres through the presumption of an originary and persistent source of incommensurability at work in the former. Not surprisingly, one can find the discourse of orality underlying many of Latin America’s best-known cultural narratives such as Indigenismo, Magical Realism, Testimonio, and even Zapatismo in Mexico. As it stands in these debates, however, orality/literacy has more often been assumed than critically interrogated. For what exactly is the relation between them? How, exactly, do we understand their relation as exclusive, irreducible, foundational semiological forms? Is it that one is inconceivable without the other, or that one must rely on the ontological guarantee provided by the other? At bottom, does this economy provide us with the insight needed to unconceal the sheer contingency of a social order in Latin America—that these categories are ultimately nothing other than empty, formal markers of difference/subordination to otherwise equal speaking beings—or does it smooth these power relations over? In other words, if orality is ultimately advanced here as an authentic, non-Western language form (i.e., orality as a logocentric reversal/substitute for Western literacy and written culture), what exactly is revolutionary or emancipatory about that? In more formal terms, is this binary conceived and deployed as a hegemonic-subaltern, or hegemonic-counterhegemonic relation? There is a difference; and though often confused, this distinction is significant and strikes at the core of the notion of the political and contemporary political thought in Latin America. Of course, it goes without saying that the category of orality has never been simply a descriptive category, but rather a constitutive one burdened with the considerable weight of anthropological discourse whose implicit ethnocentricity cannot be easily dismissed. In a recent article, Galen Brokaw takes up the question of orality in Latin America and addresses this particular disciplinary problem in the study of alternative “writing” systems in the colonial era. Brokaw’s essay foregrounds the way in which the concept of orality within dominant historical and anthropological discourse not only assumes, of course, the existence of subjects and communities that persist (or have persisted) without any recognizable or legitimate (read: alphabetic) writing system whatsoever, but also how this concept perfectly accommodates itself to the underlying Western assumption of (its own form of) writing as the necessary [End Page 204] condition for civilization: “Anthropological thought (whether it be expressed by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, or literary critics) has a tendency to draw a distinction between oral and literate societies based on the presence or absence of writing, which is usually defined in phonographic terms” (2010, 130). The problem with this premise, what Martín Lienhard has called the “fetishism of the written word” (1991, 5–11), is the series of other interconnected disciplinary conclusions that ultimately places Western writing and Western writing cultures at the apex of a long evolutionary curve. According to Brokaw, because “dominant historical and anthropological theories have often identified writing as a precondition for the development of complex socioeconomic and political systems,” orality and literacy have come to articulate, and correspond to, different and unequal modes of thought inextricable from the hierarchical structures they simultaneously imply (2010, 120). Under this anthropologico-historicist model, Brokaw reminds us, orality, because it posits a primitive evolutionary state of existence before writing...

The Ballad and Its Paradoxes

Although the English and Scottish ballads have an established place as a major folklore genre, they have remained stubbornly resistant to definition and much that has been written both about their history and about their essential characteristics has been ambiguous, confusing, and in some instances misleading. This lecture casts an eye over some of the paradoxes thrown up by the genre, taking as a starting point Child's criteria of great age, initial wholeness, traditionality, and mutability, and considering the question of orality and print. It invokes modern textual theory to shed some light on the protean nature of the genre, and a historical perspective to question whether the findings of the late Victorian and Edwardian folk song collectors really can be projected back in time.

On the Question of Orality behind Medieval Romance: The Example of the “Constance” Group

Some contemporary fairytales have antecedents in pre-modern documents. That oral traditions lie behind much medieval literature is likely; this is no less true for the “Constance” tales (ATU 706 and ATU 706C). Through the historic–geographic method, Alexander H. Krappe determined that these plots originated in Eastern Europe. An ahistorical anecdote in The Chronicle of Morea is related to the earliest documented variants of the “Constance” group, two thirteenth-century romances, Mai und Beaflor and Le Roman de la Manekine, and two episodes in historical narratives by Matthew Paris and Jans der Enikel. In addition to the basic outline of events, the common themes of relationship between an imperial centre and outlying districts are shared. The birth of this plot type, under the influence of both western and eastern sources, may then be situated in the historical context of the Fourth Crusade's aftermath in formerly Byzantine territory.

A Spoken Genre Gets Written

Many recent studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) have addressed the question of orality and literacy. This article examines a relatively recent subgenre of CMC, that of written online sports commentary, that provides us with written CMC that is clearly based on firmly established oral genres, those of radio and television sports commentary. The examples analyzed are from two English, two French, and two Spanish online football (soccer) commentaries. The purpose of the study is to examine oral traits and genre mixing in online football commentaries in the three languages and carryover from the spoken genres of radio and television commentaries to this developing genre, following Ferguson. Special attention is paid to Web page design. The study reveals that form and content of online football commentaries are strongly affected by the style of the online newspaper.

Performance and Literature in the Commedia Dell'Arte (review)

Reviewed by: Performance and Literature in the Commedia Dell’arte Erith Jaffe-Berg Performance and Literature in the Commedia Dell’arte. By Robert Henke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. 263. $70.00 cloth. Recent studies of Commedia dell'Arte published by Italian theatre historians such as Ferruccio Marotti and Roberto Tessari have reflected the difficulty in connecting the theatre genre to "low culture" as opposed to "high culture." Their studies have shown that not only did dell'Arte actors sing in the emerging early opera of the late sixteenth century, but they often performed fully-scripted pastorals and tragedies as well as showcased their work before aristocratic audiences at court as well as for plebian audiences in the piazza. Robert Henke's work is important in adding to the examination of mutual influences of high and low culture. It addresses the question of literacy and orality in Commedia dell'Arte performances, deftly arguing for a creative "contamination" between literary and verbally transmitted materials. In his thoroughly researched and finely wrought study, Henke draws from a broad array of cultural materials to present the early-modern Commedia dell'Arte actor as an author and subject not only in stage performances but also in a variety of popular literature, including zanni texts, letters written to and from actors, as well as poems and eulogies in which actors are mentioned. Many of these texts are analyzed here in English for the first time, and therefore offer a handy resource for teachers and students of Commedia dell'Arte alike. Furthermore, with the exception of an important book by Tim Fitzpatrick (The Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes in the Commedia dell'Arte: Beyond the Improvisation / Memorization, 1995), which is mostly focused on performance and the question of improvisation, Henke's work addresses a largely neglected area of study in Commedia dell'Arte—the relation between orality and literature—making it essential reading for scholars of both Commedia dell'Arte and Renaissance theatre. The book is organized into eleven chapters. The first two serve as a discussion of Henke's strategy and an overview of aspects of Commedia dell'Arte's system of characters and improvisational techniques. Chapter 3, "Residual Orality in Early Modern Italy and the Commedia dell'Arte" initiates the book's central focus by outlining aspects of oral culture that were still evident in the early-modern context. In this sometimes dense chapter Henke argues the Italian peninsula's "residually oral culture" in the late-sixteenth century created the basis for techniques culled from oral tradition. He then elaborates on the techniques by providing interesting examples that are more linguistically based than those presented in other chapters. For example, he emphasizes that the use of phonemic sound sequences (patterns of similar or dissimilar sounds) and stressed metrical units or sentences were useful as mnemonic devices in players' performances. By constant references to Commedia dell'Arte characters, however, Henke prevents the examination from becoming too technically discouraging to non-linguistics experts. By the same token, in this chapter Henke emphasizes how residual orality shaped rhetorical stylistics in the composition of speech. He exemplifies how repetition, the hallmark of extemporized speech, resulted in the stylistic mark of "copiousness," or "verbal amplification by means of extended variation" (33). At the same time, Henke reminds us that actors were themselves often highly literate cultural consumers who availed themselves of pamphlets, published collections of jokes, and books on etiquette. In the next three chapters Henke turns his attention to the buffoon and lover characters. Chapter 4 studies the Venetian buffoni, proto-Commedia dell' Arte actor-writers whose work informed that of the late sixteenth-century zanni. Chapter 5 discusses the work of early male Commedia dell'Arte actors and chapter 6 addresses that of early actresses such as Isabella Andreini but also Vincenza Armani, equally famous in her day but less discussed in theatre history texts. [End Page 539] Particularly interesting is chapter 7, "Zanni texts, 1576-1588," which highlights the work of Simone da Bologna, who tends to get less attention than other well known members of the Gelosi troupe. Henke closely studies the Lacrimoso Lamento, an oration written for Simone and published in...

Kourouma's Monnè as Aesthetics of Lying

Since the Négritude Movement the question of identity of African Literature has been asked in different ways both by writers and literary critiques. In her last book African Novels and the Question of Orality (1992), Eileen Julien gives us a sharp summary of the debate on orality and writing. After having discussed the main positions ranking from racist Eurocentric conceptions to blind and unconditional advocating of Africanity, she concludes that the question of orality and writing/literacy is actually a biased one for it makes out of an "accidental fact" an "essentialist myth." Furthermore, it confines a series of African literary productions (written or oral) in the single tight room of orality. Indeed, most of the time essentialist discourse is not based on any text, but it is part of a general anthropological consideration, or a metalanguage used by writers themselves to account for their source of inspiration. Insofar, it is no wonder that textual evidences cannot support most of the claims.

Professional Storytelling in Modern China: A Case Study of the "Yangzhou Pinghua" Tradition

This paper is based on a study of the Yangzhou storytellers verbal tradition as performed according to age-old rules and habits, as witnessed by the author during the late 1980s and early 1990s. My concern is the spoken language of the Yangzhou Pinghua storytelling tradition, which belongs to the vernacular Yangzhou dialect, one of the most southern of the North Chinese dialects. However, the language of the storytellers carries a long historical tradition with special characteristics different from the language of the ordinary townsfolk. The local dialect is modified according to the special demands of the acting and telling technique, and the performance comprises a number of different speaking styles. I discuss various methodological issues relating to the phonological, grammatical, stylistic, and narrative levels of analysis, among them the question of orality versus literacy in the spoken art of storytelling.

African Novels and the Question of Orality

African Novels and the Question of Orality

African Novels and the Question of Orality

African Novels and the Question of Orality

African novels and the question of orality

Preface Part I: Of Origins and Orality 1. Search of Continuity and Authenticity 2. An Impoverished Paradigm Part II: Arbitrariness and Specificity of Form 3. Importance of Genre Epic 4. A Dubious Heroism: Epic Modalities in L'Estrange Destin de Wangrin 5. Democratization of Epic: Les Bouts de bois de Dieu Initiation Story 6. Authority Reconstructed: Le Regard du roi 7. An Ambiguous Quest: La Carte d'identite Fable 8. The Emporer's New Clothes: Lens of Fable in La Vie et demie 9. The Mouth That Did Not Eat Itself: From Object of Representation to Medium in Devil on the Cross 10. Toward New Readings of the Novel Notes Works Cited Index

African Novels and the Question of Orality

African Novels and the Question of Orality

Roman et oralité.

N. Martin-Granel — Novels and Oral Traditions, A Review. For literary critics constantly preoccupied with the quest for sources, the only "authentic" African writer is the one who writes what the ancestors dic-tate. Barely a caricature, this myth has, in Eileen Julien's iconoclastic book African Novels and the Question of Orality, been deconstructed down to its evolution-ary or primitivist assumptions. A close reading of a few famous novels on the basis of their "oral intertext" shows that the African novelist is no more naive than other novelists. He is, indeed, the author of his text; he adapts, transposes, manipulates oral genres, as well as any informed critic can do. Although genres may be invented through writing, why would they not also be through reading?