December 17th, 2007
“Narrators narrate what audiences call for or will tolerate. When the market for a printed book declines, the presses stop rolling but thousands of copies may remain. When the market for an oral genealogy disappears, so does the genealogy itself, utterly.” (66).
This is certainly logical in consideration of the printed word. When the call for a given text declines or subsides, it remains, since it is a tangible form. Conversely, an oral genealogy will vanish if the need and the members to carry it on are gone. However, this is not the case with digital orality Read the rest of this entry »
November 27th, 2007
In a primarily oral culture, there is no way to record and recall a speech or oral performance. As Ong, Heim, and others have detailed, this is the reasoning for the structured, rhythmic nature of the oral epic. It was just not possible for the human mind to organize and remember a detailed, complex story without some form of mnemonic method applied.
The only way to reproduce a speech or orl performance would be to apprentice with the speaker, going off of his (rarely her) memory and rhythmic prompts to get the speech down and by repeating many times over the tale. However, beyond the use of writing to record these speeches, there came a point where writing was used as its own tool to produce creative works. Read the rest of this entry »