Orality and Writing

En hommage aux femmes déguisées en hommes pour accéder à la parole sur la place publique, sur les lieux  où les « halqa» sont l’unique  apanage des hommes
En hommage, aussi, aux hommes déguisés en femmes pour remplacer les femmes absentes(ifiées) de l’espace publique des « halqa »
FATIMA- ZAHRA SALIH

This thesis examines Hip Hop as a genre of oral literature. To begin this study, I examine a wide range of scholarship on orality, including what is considered the canonical work, Orality and Literature, by Walter Ong. This theorist’s conclusion draws a binary opposition between orality and writing. Hip Hop music encourages a broader definition of orality that approaches what African author Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls orature. I use Hip Hop to push back on Ong’s conclusions, and demonstrate how orality and writing can coexist in a culture. I found that there were three categories of Hip Hop songs that demonstrated the link between orality and writing. First, there are two types of Hip Hop songs that that form an intertextual relation with other songs through sampling. The first kind features a DJ that samples words and phrases to make it appear as if they are speaking over the beat. The second kind, reinterprets what the original speaker’s message was by sampling their music in a new song. Second, there is a group of Hip Hop songs that feature unique vocal styles that demonstrate how the artist intends to give an oral performance, even though they wrote the lyrics before performing them. Through these examples, my thesis examines how Hip Hop acts as orature, and broadens the definition of orality. Third, there are certain Hip Hop songs that play off of the traditional storytelling form of Western culture, demonstrating how oral culture can influence written and oral styles of storytelling.

Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Ger, a famed nineteenth-century Hasidic master, wrote an influential collection of Hebrew homilies. But it seems that R. Judah Leib’s sermons were also transcribed by his students, some of whom recorded their teacher’s words in the original Yiddish rather than Hebrew translation. This monograph builds upon a newly-discovered Yiddish manuscript of sixty pages. It presents a synoptic edition of the Yiddish text alongside the Hebrew version, thus enabling comparison of the witnesses and demonstrating the development of the various texts. The introduction uses this manuscript to explore broader historical and theoretical issues such as the relationship between written texts and oral culture, the development of written Yiddish, the nature and boundaries of translation, and the complex pathways of transmission from teachers to their students.

La narrativa se utiliza mucho en la oralidad de la lengua, ya que, al producir narraciones, se reúne y se transmite el conocimiento y el saber popular generación tras generación mediante las máximas, los acertijos, los proverbios, las fórmulas rituales y las genealogías son algunas formas de transmisión oral del conocimiento.

Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) fue uno de los principales autores de este movimiento. Fue un novelista, poeta, dramaturgo, ensayista, cuentista, periodista y autor español. Es considerado uno de los mejores dramaturgos tanto del Movimiento de la Generación del 98 como de la Edad de Plata española, comprendida entre 1900 y 1936. Revolucionó la novela y la narrativa convirtiéndola en una obra casi teatral y cinematográfica, además de integrar al teatro el expresionismo y el llamado esperpento.

(Chapter 1 from 'The Given Note': Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry) Music and poetry have often been viewed together as both are considered “auditory, temporal and dynamic art forms”. Studies of the relationships between these arts have grown throughout the twentieth century. This was underscored in 1997 with the foundation of The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), dedicated to the promotion of “transdisciplinary scholarly inquiry devoted to the relations between literature/verbal texts/language and music”. However, its relative youth as a field of enquiry is apparent in the disputed nature of its title. Sometimes referred to as “melopoetics”, this term, as Werner Wolf observes, appears “somewhat arcane […] because it implies, or at least suggests, a questionable, not to say misleading, privileging of some aspects of the interrelations between music and words/literature”. Wolf suggests, therefore, that “word and music studies” seems to have gained the upper hand over “melopoetics” in recent years. The use of the term “melopoetics” does indicate, nonetheless, a major focus of the discipline which has often tended to be from a musical, rather than a literary, perspective. It is also, as Wolf notes “a discipline in which the construction of a theoretical and terminological framework has not received due attention”. Where a framework has been suggested, it is focused primarily on the relationship between classical music and literature and gives little consideration to how the performance of music and song of an essentially oral character or in non-classical forms (such as traditional Irish music) may influence a poet’s work. This essay will examine the existing schemas and argue for a more flexible framework, cognisant of research in orality studies, ethnomusicology and recent literary theory, which may offer a more discerning appreciation of how Irish poets are influenced by traditional music.

This essay examines an instance of the use of folklore by writers in postcolonial African societies to problematize postcolonial systems in fiction. The essay discusses how Benjamin Kwakye exploits the trickster character as a semiotic figure to construe the themes of survival and social and economic insecurity in The Clothes of Nakedness. The features of the trickster deployed include the spider imagery and his webbing across geographical margins, the use of trickery and manipulation as survival and power-building strategies, and the role of the trickster as a “hero-scamp” and villain. Towards the end of the narrative, the trickster is removed from focalization, and villainous events he engineers are construed as happening in spite of him. He remerges at the end as the ubiquitous spider in whom all mysteries make sense. These strategies are related to postcolonial issues of corruption, socioeconomic marginalization, and international aid.

Το θέμα της εργασίας είναι η προφορικότητα στον γραπτό λόγο μαθητών του Δημοτικού Σχολείου. Η προφορικότητα έχει ποικίλα στοιχεία-χαρακτηριστικά γνωρίσματα που, εκτός από τον προφορικό λόγο, είναι δυνατόν σε διάφορες περιπτώσεις να εντοπιστούν και σε γραπτά κείμενα. Ο προφορικός λόγος προϋπήρχε του γραπτού. Είναι γνωστό ότι ένας μικρός αριθμός ανθρώπινων γλωσσών γνώρισαν τη γραφή και ότι οι πρώτοι άνθρωποι δε γνώριζαν τη γραφή. Ο προφορικός λόγος υπήρξε και υπάρχει τις περισσότερες φορές χωρίς τη γραφή ενώ, αντίθετα, η γραφή ποτέ χωρίς τον προφορικό λόγο. Εύκολα γίνεται λοιπόν κατανοητό πόσο σημαντικός υπήρξε ο προφορικός λόγος -και η προφορικότητα- για τον άνθρωπο διαχρονικά. Από τα παραπάνω συνάγεται ότι ο προφορικός λόγος είναι «ζωντανός», συνεχώς εξελισσόμενος και «πανταχού παρών» στην ανθρώπινη ζωή. Για τον λόγο αυτό, μία εργασία που μελετά στοιχεία προφορικότητας στον γραπτό λόγο των παιδιών, δεν μπορεί παρά να εξετάζει την «συνύπαρξή» του προφορικού λόγου με τον γραπτό, μέσα στα κείμενα που κατασκευάζουν τα ίδια τα παιδιά. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, η παρούσα εργασία εξετάζει το «πέρασμα» της προφορικότητας, δηλαδή στοιχείων του προφορικού λόγου, από το πεδίο της προφορικής επικοινωνίας στο πεδίο του γραπτού λόγου, δηλαδή στα γραπτά κείμενα των μαθητών και το κατά πόσο αυτά επηρεάζουν τη γενικότερη εικόνα του κειμένου τους.

Communicating the gospel across cultural barriers is an essential element of the Great Commission. Jesus mandated that his followers should go and make disciples of all the nations (Matt. 28:19a). The gospel was not limited to Israel, but it was good news for all peoples in all lands. Thus, beginning with Paul, Christians continue to take the gospel to πάντα τὰ ἔθνη.
Fluency in language and culture traditionally have been the benchmarks of  effectively engaging cultures in the task of teaching them to observe all that Jesus commanded (Matt. 28:20a). Missionaries have endeavored to inhabit the milieus in which they labor in order to transpose the message of the gospel in such a way that indigenous Christianity resulted with minimal levels of syncretism and apostasy. In recent decades, however, missionaries have been confronted with a another facet contextualizing the gospel into a culture.
More than 80 percent of the world’s population function within the orality framework. The prevalence of oral learners alone is sufficient stimulus to analyze the nature of orality. However, when one apprehends the extensive effect orality possesses in evangelization, discipleship, and church planting, impetus to address this issue becomes critical. Orality’s sweeping implications for missions cannot be ignored. Efficacious engagement of oral learners reaches beyond Bible storying to include an embodiment of the oral framework through deliberate adjustment of cognitive process, media selection, relational emphasis, and content structure.

Like any interpretive work, a translation is the result of a volatile hermeneutic process. In this paper I first discuss the material stages by which a poem composed in an ancient language and recorded on vellum is transformed--some would say transmuted--into one that we can read today in print in the language of our own time. I then review some specific examples of recent modern English translations of 'Beowulf, from the literal to the highly creative. While all translations represent a rewriting of the original text (and need not be disparaged on that account), some are more persuasive than others.

In Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Peters charts the arc not of communication methods or technologies, but the way in which we conceive of communication. Not how do we communicate, but how have we thought about communicating. Hawking is invoked, on the one hand, because contemporary conceptualizations of narrative, in particular their trajectories through the 20th century, are the progeny of multifarious efforts to develop a science of narrative. On the other, Hawking’s seminal monograph, A Brief History of Time (1988), distills an impossibly immense subject -- the history of the universe -- into an impossibly compact space. Narrative may not be so sprawling an object of study as the entire cosmos, but it is, nonetheless, an expansive topic.
This paper represents an attempt to trace the variegated, interrelated, evolving, diffuse, and sometimes circuitous ways in which we conceive of narrative. This effort begins with a dispute between (who else?) Aristotle and Plato. Whereas Aristotle provided a rudimentary codification of narrative as form, Plato critiques its use. We then spring forward several millennia to find Georg Lukacs challenging the dominance of the Aristotelean framework, and anticipating by nearly a century Marie-Laure Ryan’s call for a “media-conscious narratology” (Ryan and Thon 4). I traverse the well-trod terrains of Russian Formalism and French Structuralism, and investigate how these movements and their devotees aspired to develop scrupulous empirical principles that would transform the study of narrative and literature into a science: narrative’s scientific turn. A Structuralist splinter faction turned their attention to temporal dynamics, laying the groundwork for narratology. Narratology focuses on the centrality of time (as both interior and exterior to narrative), narrative as a coagulant of historical and temporal coherence, and the twin influences of tradition and cultural context. As an important tangent to print-centric narratology, I discuss the recuperation of orality both as a formidable field in its own right, and as implicative of the importance of identifying medium-specific narrative affordances. In their indispensable accounts of oral storytelling systems, Albert Lord and Walter J. Ong illustrate how narrative, media, and cognition interrelate. Following orality, I provide a brief overview of how narrative theories and epistemologies filtered into other fields and disciplines such as postmodernism, historiography, and cognitive science. In the penultimate section, I will explore the dramatic narrative transmutations prompted by the ascendance of the computer, and the (still acrimonious) collision of stories and games. In closing, I will examine recent attempts to (once again) formulate a “unified theory” of narrative that can account for its protean, media-inflected instantiations, and I suggest several lines of inquiry for how the study of narrative might proceed from this point forward.

Se il dialogo spontaneo possiede una pianificazione minima o inesistente, quello filmico è stato già pianificato, elaborato e messo nero su bianco, eppure finge di essere un prodotto estemporaneo. Questo studio intende mostrare i risultati di un’indagine condotta su un corpus costituito da due soap operas (Beautiful e CentoVetrine), analizzandone i segnali discorsivi e, più in generale, i marcatori di oralità, proponendo un confronto tra una lista dialoghi adattata da un’altra lingua e una prodotta per parlanti italiani da parlanti italiani.

"The oldest records indicate that the performance of poetry in Gaelic Ireland was normally accompanied by music, providing a point of continuity with past tradition while bolstering a sense of community in the present. Music would also offer, particularly for poets writing in English from the eighteenth century onwards, a perceived authenticity, a connection with an older tradition perceived as being untarnished by linguistic and cultural division.

While providing an innovative analysis of theoretical work in music and literary studies, this book examines how traditional Irish music, including the related song tradition (primarily in Irish), has influenced, and is apparent in, the work of Irish poets. While looking generally at where this influence is evident historically and in contemporary Irish poetry, this work focuses primarily on the work of six poets, three who write in English and three who write primarily in the Irish language: Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Cathal Ó Searcaigh."

Al nome di Teognide di Megara è legata l’unica ampia raccolta di poesia monodica arcaica e classica a noi giunta per tradizione diretta: un insieme di elegie per un totale di poco più di 1400 versi, ai quali si devono aggiungere, per tradizione indiretta, almeno altre 4 elegie monodistiche (non considerando altri versi di dubbia attribuzione). Il testimone più antico di questa raccolta è il cod. A (Parisin. Bibl. Nat. Suppl. Graec. 388), del X secolo, pubblicato nel 1815; nella cosiddetta elegia del "sigillo", collocata più o meno all’inizio della raccolta (vv. 19-26), esso presenta l’affermazione: «sono versi di Teognide il Megarese» (v. 22 sg.). Il cod. A appare diviso in due libri A e B, di cui il secondo scompare nei testimoni recenziori della tradizione manoscritta: oggi si ritiene che il libro B sia una selezione delle elegie erotiche, operata in età bizantina (IX-X sec. d. C.). Teognide è noto come autore di elegie, radunate in una raccolta scritta, almeno a partire dal tardo V secolo a. C.: suoi versi vengono citati o imitati da Ferecrate, Crizia il tiranno, Senofonte, e da Platone, che ne parla come di un autore ben conosciuto e stimato. Secondo la Suda (X sec. d. C.), Teognide è vissuto nel VI sec. a. C. e ha scritto elegie per un totale di 2800 versi, come ammaestramenti morali per il suo giovane amante Cirno. È solo a metà del 1500 che si notano dei difetti nella raccolta di Teognide: alcune elegie sono assegnate dalla tradizione indiretta ad altri autori (Tirteo, Mimnermo, Solone), un certo numero di poesie è stranamente ripetuto due volte nella raccolta, e il disordine tematico regna ovunque. Si comincia dunque a dubitare che quanto tramandato sotto il nome di Teognide sia effettivamente tutto suo, e nasce la moderna Questione teognidea. La raccolta viene interpretata come un corpus, dal momento che non tutte le poesie possono essere del poeta Teognide, e il problema cui si cerca a lungo di dare risposta (principalmente nel XIX e nel XX secolo) è quello di come questo corpus si sia costituito: la risposta che generalmente viene data è che il corpus teognideo è un’antologia, formata per aggregazione di due, o tre, o quattro, oppure molteplici fonti, in un’epoca variamente identificata (le proposte vanno dallo scorcio del VI sec. a. C. alla tarda età bizantina). Sono state però individuate anche sequenze di elegie che devono ricondursi alle recitazioni simposiali dell’età greca arcaica: esse mostrano che la costituzione di almeno buona parte del corpus si deve ad un apporto simposiale molto antico, e possono far interpretare l’intero corpus come una raccolta nata dalla registrazione scritta di varie elegie eseguite oralmente nei simposi.
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una bassa frequenza di enjambements 'periodici' o 'necessari' (tali cioè da investire la struttura stessa della frase e non invece elementi accessori quali aggettivi o avverbi) e irregolarità metriche a proposito delle quali si può ricordare l'argomento della tesi 'complementare' parigina di Parry del 1928 (Les formules et la métrique d'Homère), e cioè l'iato anomalo (il mancato abbreviamento dei dittonghi e la mancata elisione di vocale breve davanti a vocale): un fenomeno che sembra dipendere in primo luogo dalla modificazione di formule o espressioni formulari (che dovevano essere adattate alla nuova sintassi del discorso) o dalla giustapposizione di formule diverse.

Il presente contributo intende sviluppare alcune riflessioni storiografiche riguardanti il modo in cui il rapporto tra predicazione e Inquisizione è stato affrontato negli ultimi decenni dagli storici italiani e stranieri in riferimento alla prima età moderna. Allo stesso tempo si prefigge di mettere a fuoco alcuni dei problemi metodologici con cui la storiografia si è misurata e dovrà in futuro confrontarsi per sfruttare a pieno le potenzialità di un campo, quello della relazione tra predicatori e inquisitori, ancora in parte da esplorare. In alcuni casi il saggio affronta direttamente, in maniera direi più tradizionale, le questioni storiografiche e metodologiche; in altri casi, la maggior parte, introduce il lettore ai temi del dibattito storiografico e della riflessione metodologica attraverso il filtro degli avvenimenti della storia religiosa del Cinquecento e dei personaggi che ne hanno animato la vicenda. Per necessità di spazio e per le limitate competenze dell'autore l'oggetto delle pagine che il lettore ha tra le mani è circoscritto al Cinquecento, il secolo peraltro in cui il rapporto tra predicazione e Inquisizione si fece più stretto e problematico. Senza la minima pretesa di esaustività, l'intento è dunque quello di tracciare alcune linee di sviluppo storiografico e indicare all'attenzione del dibattito scientifico alcuni nodi problematici che tale campo di studi solleva.

1.Orality, Writing and History: The literature of the Bugis and Makasar of South Sulawesi (Introduction to Special Issue), by Stephen C. Druce

2.Christian Pelras and His Work, by Campbell Macknight

3.Orality and Writing among the Bugis (trans. Campbell Macknight), by Christian Pelras

4.The Media of Bugis Literature: A Coda to Pelras, by Campbell Macknight

5.Transmitting the past in South Sulawesi: The hikajat Sawitto and other Bugis and Makasar Historical Works, by Stephen C. Druce

6.Family Matters: Bugis Genealogies and their Contribution to Austronesian Studies, by Ian Caldwell and Kathryn Wellen

7.The Inside View on Makassar's Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century History: Changing Marital Alliances and Settlement Patterns, by David Bulbeck

8.The Pau-paunna Indale Patara: Sufism and the Bugis Adaption and Transformation of the hikayat Indra Putera, by Nurhayati Rahman

9.Narratives of Sexuality in Bugis and Makasar Manuscripts, by Muhlis Hadrawi

In Europe, until the middle of the 18th century, music has been taught in oral tradition. Rise of new technologies and also spreading literacy, printed materials became the most significant part of music education. Whereas, In Ottoman Empire, the tradition 'meşk' was not only a method for teaching instrument and transition of musical repertoire. It is always considered that 'the tradition itself'. Beginning from the middle of the 19th century, with westernization, European traditions leaked into the Ottoman Palace. So the tradition began to change. Starting from the 20th century, method books began to appear.

lnScotlardaccountsofbandsofitinerantperformersareentered inbgpvernment records from late medieval times. These are in the form of enactments which, in W.i. Watson'g words 'were primarily directed atbands of wanderingbards known from old as Clbr Shandsin or Seanchan's Band, who had no fixed residence, but went around quarterlng themselves on the people and often bchaving themselves ln a most insolent fashion" (Watson "Classic Gaelic Poetr{' 201). ln 1,()7 the Scottish Parliament enacled legislation to the effect "that in all justlce ayres the kingis iustice tak inquisicione of sornaris, bardis, masterful beggars -.. and...banyeh them thecuntryorsend them to lhe kingis presone" (201). The year 1574 saw an 'Actag'ainst'masterhrl'idle beggars and sorners and bardsand rhymers and hymners roaming the country." lf theyhad resources they were to be imprisoned, or lacking these, their ears were nailed to a pos t or tree, or cu t of f, a nd they were ba ni shed, to b€ ha nged if they rehrrned (Carmichael "Traditions" 322). The thrust of the legislation is made doubly clear regardingrestrictionsonsorningin theStahatesof lona in 1609(Thomson C-omponion 13$-39). On August 23 of that year in the court at lona held by Andrew, Bishop of the lsles, it was enacted of common consent that "no vagabond, bard or profest pleisant pretending liberty to bard and flatter be recelved within theboundsof the said Islesbyany of the said specialbarons and gentlemen or by any other inhabitrnts thereof, or be entertained by them, but in case any vagabonds, bards, iugglers or such like be apprehended by them, such are tobe put in sure seizementand kept in the stocks, and thereaftcr tobe debarred forth of the counhy with all goodly expedition." ln his discussion of theenactmenls Watson adds that"the familyorcourtbards were not meanl is sufficientlyclearfrom the namesof thechiefs subscribed to the statutes, several of whom we know to have kept a bard then and long afterwards." I n fact some provision to this effect was made a generation or two earlier in an enactment stating that "all menlsrales, sangstares and tailtellaris Isg euu,iclul not avouil in special s€rvlcebe someof the lordisof parliamentorgreatbarronis," wcreliable to be scourgcd or bumton thecheek or hanged (Watson "Classic Gaelic l'oetr/' 201-21. That some political motivations were present in the legislation over lwo centuries is evident frcm Acts of Parliament and the Privy Council passcd between 16fl) and 163O designcd to enforce earlier legislation. Here the

The prosimetric form, the incorporation of verse in prose narrative, is a distinctive generic feature of vernacular fiction in late imperial China. Many scholars have regarded verse in fiction as a type of narrative redundancy or a sign of orality. This article examines the narrative significance of verse in Feng Menglong’s “The Pearl Shirt Reencountered,” arguing that Feng utilized the two narrative spaces of the prosimetric form—verse space and prose space—to juxtapose a highly moralizing narratorial voice with a counter-voice influenced by Wang Yangming’s “School of the Mind.”

This contribution aims to establish a graphematic theory of medieval writing and to demonstrate that the graphic signs admit, like any other level of language, a historical analysis through the parameters of variational linguistics. This work defines four areas of language where the variation of spelling and punctuation occurs and puts forward the example of several manuscripts, covering the periods of the Old and the Middle French. The diamesic axis refers to the relations of correspondence or autonomy between the phonic and the graphic substances of language. The enunciative parameter concerns the relations of the written form to the recording of reported speech. The diastratic parameter is related to the variation of register between prestigious graphs or less valued graphs. The conceptional parameter allows for the classification of the punctuation traditions in relation to the textual typology established by Koch and Oesterreicher  (2001), which opposes the linguistic forms proper to immediate communication and those specific to language of distance.

Abstract (engl.)
The article presents a new conceptual framework for understanding literacy in ancient civilisations to conceptualise ‘literacy’ more broadly as a cultural and social practice. For this it is necessary to focus on the complex relationship between orality and writing, accentuate the materiality of writing as well as questions of agency and acknowledge the social role of texts and writing as part of Egyptian memory culture.

Abstract (dt.)
Der vorliegende Artikel schlägt einen erweiterten konzeptuellen Rahmen für das Verständnis von Schriftlichkeit vor. Das Konzept ‘Schriftlichkeit’ wird darin als kulturelle und soziale Anwendung und Tätigkeit verstanden. Das wird möglich bei Beachtung der vielschichtigen Beziehung von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit/Schreiben. Desweiteren wird die Materialität des erweiterten Schreibprozesses und die Handlungsfähigkeit aller am Prozess beteiligten Instanzen diskutiert. Die soziale Funktion von Texten und Schreiben im Allgemeinen als Teil des altägyptischen kulturellen Gedächtnisses ist der dritte Bereich der diskutiert warden muss, um Schriftlichkeit innerhalb der altägytischen Gesellschaft vollständig erfassen zu können.

In this essay I use the imperial library as a figure of the dynamic reading practices of an imperial elite and to frame the early rabbis’ own relationship to the book. The rabbis, like Aristeas and Josephus writing in Greek, I will argue, are significantly affected by the imagined imperial reader and his library. Their language, genres, media, and content are similarly created in relationship to them. Key elements distinguishing tannaitic literature from antecedent Jewish literatures are some of the very things that align them with Roman literary culture: (1) a heightened sense of the authority of the book, and a belated and deferential stance
to the book-based knowledge manifested in careful attention to wording, precision, and citation as driving mode of creation/composition; (2) a sense of foreboding in the face of the proliferation of knowledge, and an attempt to manage it; and (3) the emergence of the real person from behind the pseudepigraph, and the concurrent elevation of the human scholar-expert, who curates and brokers knowledge, and functions in his person as a sort of walking library. In highlighting these parallels I
hope to communicate that rabbis are not prima fascia an inversion of the imperial, an outlier or special case. Indeed, they are facing down some of the same challenges that vex Pliny, and in this way they are fellow travellers. And yet even as they shape a Roman-inflected literacy, the rabbis curtail imperial logic, and move dramatically to thwart it. The primary gestures of this recusal are three: a contraction of the sacred library and a concomitant censorship of both Jewish and non-Jewish books; a refusal to trace non-Scriptural knowledge to books; and the refusal of authorship – they not only don’t depict themselves writing, but they do not attribute works to individual persons. In sum, the rabbis’ unusual focus on the book – the ways they reify the textuality of one small corpus, while stigmatizing the authorizing power of all others – deviates from the book-centered Jewish imagination that preceded them. Looking at the rabbinic project through the lens of the Roman book consumer, for whom the production and circulation of books was central to intellectual life, we might draw together a set of related aversions: in saying no to knowledge derived from books, no to writing, no to authorship, to Greek and Aramaic and most antecedent genres, the early rabbis create a literary cosmos that confronts the Roman reader/librarian with daunting barriers.

The presence of runic writing before the influx of Latinate literacy in Anglo-Saxon England is often neglected when investigating the transitional nature of orality and literacy in vernacular Anglo-Saxon writing. The presence of runes in Anglo-Saxon society and Old English manuscripts supports the theory that Old English poetry operated within a transitional period between orality and literacy (as argued by O'Keeffe (1990), Pasternack (1995), Amodio (2005)). However runic symbols prob-lematize the definition of orality within Old English oral-formulaic studies because runic writing practices predate Latinate literacy in England. This article explores the possibility that the orality contained within Old English poetry is a form of secondary orality due to the pre-existence of runic writing in Anglo-Saxon England. This form of secondary orality occurs within the wider social cultural shift between primary orality and modern hyper-literate states as runes act as a literary representation of change within the construction of thought and literature in the English language. This article suggests that runes can be understood as a type of 'transitional literacy' between primary orality and Latinate derived literary practices. They act as a way of composing and recording thought as text while still maintaining elements strongly associated with the construction of a primary oral culture in how the texts are interpreted by a culture familiar with writing. Therefore clarification must be made when understanding Old English as a transitional poetic form, namely that the nature and degree of transition contained within Old English poetry builds upon runic inscriptions as it represents a transition between a Germanic and Latinate forms of textuality and literacy.

It is my PhD thesis, you can also find it online just writing 'Elisa Bugin DSpace': the download is free.

My thesis aims to demonstrate how cognitive science, and, particularly, in this case, the study of working memory (WM), can draw a sharp distinction between orality and writing. Applying to Greek epic poetry what cognitive science teaches about WM, I will demonstrate that the Iliad and the Odyssey had an oral genesis and, for a long time, a completely oral transmission. I will argue that by the same token it is possible to confirm that other epic poems, such as the Argonautica and the Posthomerica had a written genesis and transmission.
  Applying cognitive science to these various epic texts and studying mental processes that distinguish orality from writing, I will show that signs of cognitive processes concerning orality are still evident in Homer whereas signs of cognitive processes concerning writing are visible in Apollonius of Rhodes and Quintus of Smyrna.

This thesis is the fruit of a research project which marries translation practice and theory. Separated into two volumes, it explores questions related to the translation of slang in fictional texts. The first volume is a critical commentary composed of three parts, and the second a translation from French into English of the novel Moi non by Patrick Goujon (Gallimard, 2003). Since the plot unfolds in the banlieue of Paris, the critical component investigates the way in which marginalised youth can express themselves through slang, a variety of non-standard language. Often representative of a specific place and identity, slang constitutes one of many forms of expression that contribute to setting marginalised youth apart from dominant groups. Such use of language raises a number of questions, both concrete and abstract in nature, when one decides to transcribe and translate it in a work of fiction. Translators often employ standard language to render this voice in the translated text or otherwise make use of an “equivalent” slang. The proposed translation of Moi non embodies an alternative method inspired by an overall informal style of writing, as well as by the creative devices employed in rap lyrics and in the creation of slang words and expressions. In an effort to avoid suggesting a specific setting outside of the banlieue, this translation seeks to identify and harness features of English shared by young people throughout the Anglosphere. This thesis thus represents an opportunity to ensure the coherence and the logic of this alternative approach to translating slang in an entire novel, and to compare this approach with that adopted by the translators of similar texts.

The thesis of this study is that a number of features in the prose style of Biblical Hebrew relate to the diˆerences between oral and written language, namely (a) the use of subordinate clauses (hypotaxis), (b) the length of the noun string, (c) the number of explicit syntactic constituents in the clause, and (d) the frequency of reference by means of pronouns and deictic particles. Systematic analysis of these features shows that texts from the Persian era typically contain many subordinated clauses (hypotaxis), long noun strings and explicit syntactic constituents. The same tendencies are revealed by texts that may be ascribed to the Babylonian era (e.g., the prose narratives about Jeremiah) or the seventh century (e.g., the Deuteronomistic history of the Judean kings in 2 Kings 11-22), but to a lesser extent. In contrast, most texts belonging to the tales of the Patriarchs, the rise of the monarchy (Samuel, Saul and David), the Omride dynasty and the northern prophets (Elijah and Elisha), and part of the Exodus narrative, consist of short clauses, containing only a small number of explicit syntactic constituents. In these texts hypotaxis and long noun strings are relatively rare, whereas reference by pronoun and deictic particles is frequent. Hence the distinction between these strata pertains to some of the most basic aspects of language usage. It is our thesis that these diˆerences are rooted in syntactic preferences, which re˘ect diˆerent social and historical conditions. In view of sociolinguistic research, it seems likely that the more complicated style emerged in the scribal chancellery. As we shall try to show in the discussion of our ˜ndings, the more a text is rooted in the scribal context, the more complicated its language, in terms of hypotaxis, length of the noun string, and the number of explicit sentence constituents. In contrast, the closer a text is to spoken language and oral literature, the simpler it is, in terms of syntactic structure, reference, and clause length. 1 Narratives composed in such a style seem, then, to re˘ect a substratum of oral literature. Analysis of these issues can contribute much to our understanding of the development of the ancient Hebrew prose style.

Most of us have learned the Bible from cherry pickers, snackers,
Scripture surgeons, fragmentists—who believe real theology derives
primarily from the New Testament. Since we tend to teach as we were
taught—i.e., Bible bits learned through systematic theology—we create
more of the same. Is it any wonder that a grand narrative,3 the big
picture, the metanarrative of the Scripture story, is so foreign to pastors
and people in the pews? To cross-cultural Christian workers and those
they serve at home and abroad? And those reaching post-modernists and
post-truthers? Have we made the Bible one of the worst-taught books in
the world?

This article is a first attempt at highlighting mobility issues in bookbinding design in Ethiopia, mainly in Harar, on the basis of examples from the collection of Islamic manuscripts of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa.
Keywords : binding, Ethiopia, Harar, mobility, orality.

This chapter aims to both reflect upon my own fieldwork among the Bugis of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and my engagement with the scholarship of the ethnologist Christian Pelras, who wrote extensively on South Sulawesi culture and history. Explicit about his task of translating one culture to another, Pelras took an 'ethnographic' approach to his research, collecting huge amounts of information that he used in order to describe. His wide focus and attempts to translate one culture to another appear to reflect the European-based attempts to understand the 'other', perhaps like a museum of ethnology. By contrast, scholars of my generation are less concerned with describing, more critical of sources, look to solve particular research problems in a context that may not necessarily be our own, and use skills, approaches and techniques developed elsewhere. In particular, I discuss my engagement with Pelras's work on orality and writing and his attempts to reconstruct the South Sulawesi past. While the chapter is critical of some of Pelras's work on the Bugis, particularly his attempts at writing history, it pays tribute to other aspects. Keywords South Sulawesi • Bugis • Orality and writing • Christian Pelras • La Galigo I would like to thank Campbell Macknight for his helpful and informative comments on this chapter.

The research here approaches the topic of the devotional values of the act of writing/reading aloud a formalised text. Especially when speaking about the southeast European rural milieu up to the second half of the 19th century, the presence of scribes and of readers was relatively rare, although not completely absent. We are dealing with people for whom writing/copying a text and/or listening to a reader was not a habit or a daily practice, but a special event more or less attached to a ritual or the ritualised context of performance.
The paper discusses the particular case of a certain version of the Apocrypha, ‘the Legend of Sunday’, also known as the ‘Epistle Fallen From Heaven’, a version today stored in the archive of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest. It was copied and carried by a soldier in the First World War, to protect himself from being injured or killed.
In the first part of the study I analyse the flexibility of this verbal structure, which allows interesting insertions by the scribe in order to increase both the efficacy of the text and the receivers’ (!) belief in its miraculous power. In this regard, the story within a story that I am speaking about worked as a vehicle to help the spread of a distinctive group of legends and magic practices. My aim is to grasp the dynamics of the believers’ expectations in the effectiveness of writing/reading/holding a special text.
Key workds: devotional writing, Heavenly Epistles, First World War, Romanian culture

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish literature. Her work, drawing on Irish mythology, folklore and orature has also attracted considerable international acclaim and has been widely translated. However,  Ní Dhomhnaill  has also indicated an awareness of the problematical relationship of women historically to Irish literature. Women have for centuries being portrayed, whether in the Gaelic aisling or in the literature of the literary revival, as representative of Ireland, often to the neglect of their real lived experiences. Equally, within the Irish literary tradition, as Seán Ó Tuama has noted, “attested works by women are quite rare”(Ó Tuama, 1995). Women’s ‘literature’, as Ní Dhomhnaill suggests, was found largely in the oral tradition much of which went unrecorded. Throughout her work, she regularly draws on aspects of this legacy of women’s performances, including the lament and song traditions, to inform her work. This obvious intertextual process at work in her poetry is examined in this essay with regard to the traditional process of composition of songs and laments by women in Ireland and in relation to its use in other contexts. This paper also explores how this process of reclaiming aspects of Ireland’s oral culture represents Ní Dhomhnaill’s rewriting and replacing of the female voice within her own work while asserting her own right of expression in literature.

This article introduces and overviews New Testament media criticism. Media criticism is an emerging biblical methodology that encompasses four related fields: orality studies, social memory theory, performance criticism, and the Bible in modern media. The article addresses the methodological foundations of these fields and reviews recent contributions in each of them.

The European immigrants to America around 1900 were
passing through various orders of literacy on their transatlantic journey and during processing at the ports of entry. An extensive record-keeping accompanying their entry into America produced an archive that is in itself a monument to sophisticated information management. The activities at the processing station of Ellis Island in the Port of New York, a site of passage for some twelve million immigrants from 1890 to 1954, include well-documented literacy forms and practices. The “reading from below” approach described in this paper focuses on: (1) the passage itself as the site of reading and literacy; (2) reading the immigrants’ bodies as shaped by the criteria of legibility defined by the ideologies of the state, eugenics, and the labor market; and (3) immigrant visibility and representations in the media. Drawing on oral histories, archival records, and contemporary media and visual culture, this research reflects on the institutional “ways of seeing” in the Progressive era – its ambiguities regarding scientism, efficiency, and human value – that shaped how immigrants could be seen and interpreted.