Cover -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of maps -- Notes on contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 Orality in Southeast Asia -- 2 The languages in India and a movement in retrospect -- 3 Indigenous languages of Arnhem Land -- 4 Orality and writing in Spanish America: a translation perspective -- 5 "How to write an oral culture": indigenous tradition in contemporary Canadian native writing -- 6 Indigenous languages in Canada -- Index
Not long ago we were quite confident about how to go about thinking. If we wanted to think about some fundamental value—say, justice—we charted the course of our exploration over the broad and silent ocean of historical and philosophical knowledge accumulated in libraries. Within the last few decades, however, we have discovered, to our dismay, that knowledge has burst the boundaries of print to attack not only eyes, but ears, touch—the whole sensorium. Ease of travel and the wonders of electronics have launched us into an informational universe of too many dimensions. We can be almost anywhere. We can watch space lift-offs and half-an-hour later watch magnified human sperm travel into the womb and beyond. We can "see" the color-coded temperature of Jupiter and look back from beyond the Earth. We can see and hear war happen.
In exploring the everyday workplace and community environments of adults with liminal literacy, this book demonstrates how a media ecology perspective allows adult literacy and orality to be reimagined within a deeper and more holistic way than possible within disconnected disciplinary areas.
The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius' Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter
Religious scholars take up various questions relating to the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of colonized people in antiquity, and explore the role of orality in relation to this hegemony. Among the topics are theoretical and methodological foundations, Mithra's cult as an example of religious colonialism in Roman times, th
This book explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece and is the first systematic and sustained treatment at this level. It examines the recent theoretical debates about literacy and orality and explores the uses of writing and oral communication, and their interaction, in ancient Greece. It is concerned to set the significance of written and oral communication as much as possible in their social and historical context, and to stress the specifically Greek characteristics in their use, arguing that the functions of literacy and orality are often fluid and culturally determined. It draws together the results of recent studies and suggests further avenues of enquiry. Individual chapters deal with (among other things) the role of writing in archaic Greece, oral poetry, the visual and monumental impact of writing, the performance and oral transmission even of written texts, and the use of writing by the city-states; there is an epilogue on Rome. All ancient evidence is translated
1. The orality of language -- 2. The modern discovery of primary oral cultures -- 3. Some psychodynamics of orality -- 4. Writing restructures consciousness -- 5. Print, space and closure -- 6. Oral memory, the story line and characterization -- 7. Some theorems.
Oral communication is quite different in its spontaneity and communicative power from textual and visual communication. Culturally-bounded expectations of ways of speaking and individual creativity provide the spark that can ignite revolution or calm the soul. This book explores, from a cross-cultural perspective, the centrality of orality in the ideological processes that dominate public discourse, providing a counterbalance to the debates that foreground literacy and the power of written communication.
This chapter argues that the proliferation of magical realist fiction in East Asia since the 1980s is a testament to both the narrative mode's adaptability in cultures beyond the West and different authors' ability to refashion magical realist elements into distinctive styles of writing that draw on local literary traditions and influences. Magical realism in East Asia reflects a shared approach to addressing contemporary issues that result from modernity, rapid economic development and increasing integration between East and West, the erosion of traditional cultures and values, authoritarian political regimes and environmental degradation. This chapter focuses primarily on writers from China (Mo Yan, Yu Hua and Yan Lianke), but also covers authors from Taiwan (Wu Ming-yi), Japan (Banana Yoshimoto) and South Korea (Hwang Sok-yong) in order to illustrate the wide variety and innovative nature of magical realist fiction in this region.
The paper traces the ordinary—yet extraordinary—life story of a Bedouin woman, Amneh, in historic Southern Palestine from the 1930s to the 1970s. Amneh's oral narratives and memories combine the personal and the political, drawing a picture of the lives that the often forgotten Palestinian Bedouin population of the South lived before, during and after theNakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948. Her counter-narrative challenges and complicates the hegemonic settler-colonial, ethno-nationalist, elite and male-dominated historiography of the region, and confirms her as an historical actor who finds her ways through difficult social, political, economic and cultural constraints. Although unique, her story is not exceptional, nor is it representative of 'Bedouin women of the Naqab'. Rather, it offers a lens through which the much more intricate and messy historical realities in the Naqab can be unfolded. As such, Amneh's biography, as told by her, is also telling of the wider social and political dynamics, relations and events in the region at the time.