Download Free Interfaces Between The Oral And The Written Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Interfaces Between The Oral And The Written and write the review.

In the African context, there exists the 'myth' that orality means tradition. Written and oral verbal art are often regarded as dichotomies, one excluding the other. While orature is confused with 'tradition', literature is ascribed to modernity. Furthermore, local languages are ignored and literature is equated with writing in foreign languages. The contributions in this volume take issue with such preconceptions and explore the multiple ways in which literary and oral forms interrelate and subvert each other, giving birth to new forms of artistic expression. They emphasize the local agency of the African poet and writer, which resists the global commodification of literature through the international bestseller lists of the cultural industry. The first section traces the movement from oral to written texts, which in many cases coincides with a switch from African to European languages. But as the essays in the section on "New Literary Languages" make clear, in other cases a true philological work is accomplished in the African language to create a new written and literary medium. Through the mixing of languages in the cities, such as the Sheng spoken in Kenya or the bilinguality of a writer such as Cheik Aliou Ndao (Senegal), new idioms for literary expressions evolve. The use of new media, technology or music stimulate the emergence of new genres, such as Taarab in East Africa, radio poetry in Yoruba and Hausa, or Rap in the Senegal, as is shown in the section on "Forms of New Orality." It is a great achievement of this second volume of Versions and Subversions in African Literatures that it assembles contributions by scholars from the anglophone and the francophone world and that it covers literary production in a broad spectrum of languages: English, French, Hausa, Sheng, Sotho, Spanish, Swahili, Wolof and Yoruba. Some of the authors and cultural practitioners treated in detail are: Mobolaij Adenubi, Birago Diop, Boubacar Boris Diop, David Maillu, Thomas Mofolo, Cheik Aliou Ndao, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Hubert Ogunde, Shaaban Robert, Wole Soyinka, Ibrahim YaroYahaya, and Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou.
Essays on the complex relationship between oral and literate modes of communication.
How did the visual, the oral, and the written interrelate in antiquity? The essays in this collection address the competing and complementary roles of visual media, forms of memory, oral performance, and literacy and popular culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Incorporating both customary and innovative perspectives, the essays advance the frontiers of our understanding of the nature of ancient texts as regards audibility and performance, the vital importance of the visual in the comprehension of texts, and basic concepts of communication, particularly the need to account for disjunctive and non-reciprocal social relations in communication. Thus the contributions show how the investigation of the interface of the oral and written, across the spectrum of seeing, hearing, and writing, generates new concepts of media and mediation.
When two people from different cultures meet, they both act in accordance with what is self-evident, that is to say natural, to them, The only problem is that the what is self-evident to some may not coincide with what is self-evident to others. Also, as people have a tendency to consider their way as going without saying or as universal, when others do not act in the same way as they do and there is conflict, they get easily annoyed. As a French businessman in China once cried out « The Chinese ask me if I eat snake. I say to them: ‘I do not eat snake, but swallow insults every day’ ». In fact, in intercultural contacts, when people seem strange to others, often, it is perhaps not that they are strange, but because others judge their behaviour with their own cultural criteria. Every culture has its own behavioural logic. However, the logic of some does not correspond to that of others. Individuals often have the same objectives, but to reach them, they take different cultural paths.
Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the diverse spoken languages of Italy. The second group of essays studies the influence of speech on the written word and reveals that, as fourteenth-century Tuscan became accepted as a literary standard, contemporary non-standard spoken languages were seen to possess an immediacy that made them an effective resource within certain kinds of written communication. The third part considers the roles of orality in the worlds of the learned and of learning. The book as a whole demonstrates that the borderline between orality and writing was highly permeable and that the culture of the period, with its continued reliance on orality alongside writing, was often hybrid in nature.
This book approaches a central concern of oral literature studies worldwide, with a special focus on Africa: how to deal with oral genres in a world where new technologies have become available to more and more people? As the book asserts, what is new is that the spotlight is directed towards (old and new) "interlocutors" who cooperate in the making of technologized oral genres in an increasingly technologized world. Their interactions affect the performance, as well as research - their roles and positions raise methodological and ethical questions particularly when local/national identities and commercial interests are at stake. (Series: African Studies / Afrikanische Studien - Vol. 45)
Demonstrates how McLuhan extended insights derived from advances in physics and artistic experimentation into a theory of acoustic space which he then used to challenge the assumptions of visual space that had been produced through print culture.
What can texts - both written and oral - tell us about the societies that produce them? How are texts constituted in different cultures, and how do they shape societies and individuals? How can we understand the people who compose them? Drawing on examples from Africa and other countries, this original study sets out to answer these questions, by exploring textuality from a variety of angles. Topics covered include the importance of genre, the ways in which oral genres transcend the here-and-now, and the complex relationship between texts and the material world. Barber considers the ways in which personhood is evoked, both in oral poetry and in written diaries and letters, discusses the audience's role in creating the meaning of texts, and shows textual creativity to be a universal human capacity expressed in myriad forms. Engaging and thought-provoking, this book will be welcomed by anyone interested in anthropology, literature and cultural studies.