The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)

Synopsis

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary StudiesWho speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”—core ideas of modern literary theory—were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—starting with Homer and the Bible—had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing,” Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.

Copyright:

2016

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

274 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780823270484

Related ISBNs:

9780823270477, 9780823270460

Publisher:

Fordham University Press

Date of Addition:

02/05/25

Copyrighted By:

Fordham University Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Literature and Fiction, Technology, Social Studies, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.