Orality and the Problem of Memory A professor of mine once posed the question: “What do you truly know?” My obvious initial response was, “What do you mean, what do I know? Isn’t that why I’m here? To expand upon the wealth of knowledge that I already know?” After tossing the question around for a few days, I finally realized what she was getting at--knowledge equals experience, and experience promotes memory. In today’s culture of hypertext and cyberspace, the opportunities for experiential
nonetheless has enabled us to study his works with an accuracy memory alone could not provide. Records in themselves are an important part of our functioning society, whether genealogical or financial. Works Cited Citations Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Saenger, Paul. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Sanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997.
Chaucer's "The House of Fame": The Cultural Nature of Fame QUESTION 7. DISCUSS THE CULTURAL NATURE OF FAME AND ITS TEXTUAL EXPRESSION WITH REFERENCE TO ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING: ORAL HEROIC POETRY, CHAUCER'S DEPICTION IN THE HOUSE OF FAME AND THE MODERN CONSTRUCTION OF THE CANON OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. YOU SHOULD FOCUS YOUR ANALYSIS ON THE INTERPLAY OF ORAL AND LITERARY TRADITIONS IN THESE CONTEXTS. Many critics have noted the complexities within Chaucer's The House of Fame, in particular
The character of literary forms always evolves with the passage of times. Although African literature in its written form (as against the traditional oral form) has a relatively short pedigree, it has not failed to constantly renew itself by evolving, principally in its social functionality, either as an avenue to demonstrate a cultural point of view or a satirical vista. Consequently, this attribute is responsible for the peculiar aesthetics that particularizes the literature. Given the peculiarity
What does the famous actor, Angelina Jolie have in common with author Neil Postman? According to IMDB.com, they both appeared July 14, 2003, on an episode of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”. To many, the appearance of Neil Postman’s on the faux news program may seem odd. Considering that in Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the author gives a scathing appraisal of when television news acts as entertainment. As a four-decade long New
put it in the introduction of his book Orality and Literacy, “Our understanding of the differences between orality and literacy developed only in the electronic age, not earlier.” Social networks and the activity that occurs on them is an extension of orality, though many could argue that status updates and tweets are literary due to their written form. However, the digital age is an age of ‘secondary orality’, a resurgence of orality if you will. The orality of telephones, television, and the Internet
The Cheese and the Worms Book Review The rise of literacy towards the end of the Middle Ages brought with it a torrent of individuals ready to think fro themselves and formulate their own theories and ideas regarding God and the Christian faith. For a long time, the church held a near monopoly on literacy and used this to maintain control over people’s lives and beliefs. While some of these new intellectuals created ideas that would forever change the way people envision themselves and their relation
The Future of Literature in the Age of Technology Bolstered by the recent advancements in technology, our society has gradually departed from the culture of the printed word to a computer culture structured by the digital word. Everyday the superior performance of computers appears to render printed literature more obsolete - e-mail and chat rooms have nearly eliminated traditional written letters, the Internet has all but replaced the need for libraries and paper catalogues and, soon, hypertext
In order to understand the “center” of the Iliad, one must first recognize that the Iliad started as a “Lyrical,” or oral poem and was written down much later in history, becoming a “Narrative,” or literate poem. The Iliad began as a poem that was strictly part of an oral culture, its transition into a written work for a literate culture brought complexities and complications that are often overlooked when examining this poem on its surface. Walter J. Ong explained this phenomenon best when he described
Having to Write with Whipped Cream Our assignment was to write twenty words without using any kind of writing utensil that we would normally use such as pencils, markers, etc. When Professor Krause first gave this assignment I thought to myself “is he insane? How are we going to do this?” The more and more I thought about it ideas kept popping up in my head. I tried to think about all the readings we had done in class, hoping that they would kind of guide me in the proper direction for this
the communication of truth independent of time. I think an understanding of this (self-subverting) form has some important and complicated implications for a reading of Absalom, Absalom!, especially in terms of the relationship of historicity to orality in the novel, and of its distinctive and relatively homogeneous prose style. Ultimately to be found in these themes are the novel's fantasies of its form and of its reader. The new aesthetic defines itself in relationship to an implied old one
literate culture. Only recently have we been exposed to the phenomenon of communication that utilizes both orality and literacy, better known to us as social media. With help from Walter Ong’s vast research, we are able to explore social media as a form of communicating and disseminating information. Ong’s thoughts of our embrace of a written-based society, coupled with our long history of orality, can help to explain the blending of both of these concepts under the umbrella of social media – the central
however, its origin is still debatable among literary scholars because of the play’s similarities to other written works, orality characteristics, noetic economy and universality with the European socio-religious culture. According to literary scholars... ... middle of paper ... ...s. This particular piece is a valuable step toward textuality. It test the barriers set by orality and attempts to expand the act of story telling by incorporating traits, which were further developed with the increase
the first shift, the diffusion of writing and literacy that appeared to completely scrub primary orality from the face of every civilization that took up its successor? According to Walter J. Ong, that first diffusion of literacy completely rewired the human mind in order to create a more advanced society that depended on writing to survive.
be categorized by the abundant publication, consumption and manipulation of information, especially by both computers and computer networks. It is important to note that the digital age has affected the subject of humanities in major ways. Through orality and the fluctuation of popular literacy, it possible to note just how much virtual space has altered the human kind as a whole – digital experience are no longer separate in this human world. In order to combat these continuous changes we must “.
Canadian Literature Louise Halfe – Healing Through Orality and Spirituality in Poetry Louise Bernice Halfe was born in 1953 in Two Hills, Alberta. Her Cree name is SkyDancer. She grew up a member of the Saddle Lake Reserve and at the age of 7 was sent to the Blue Quills Residential School in St. Paul, Alberta. . After leaving the school at the age of 16, she attended St. Paul’s Regional High School where she began to journal about her life experiences. (McNally Robinson) Halfe has a degree
“The Post-Apocalyptic Library: Oral and Literate Culture in Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz” Review Rough Draft Spencer, Susan. “The Post-Apocalyptic Library: Oral and Literate Culture in Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, vol. 32, no. 4, 1991, pp. 331-342. Summary In “The Post-Apocalyptic Library: Oral and Literate Culture in Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz”, Susan Spencer quotes Eric Havelock to argue
The ability to tell one’s own story, to speak one’s mind, is the best antidote to powerlessness. Tan’s writing instills agency and visibility in Chinese American women. The silence is broken, and their new voices are constructed in collective storytelling, a language of community, without denying or erasing the different positions such collaboration encounters. Tan compels each of her characters to tell their own story in their own words, thus (re)creating the meanings of their life. The interrelated
14). Islam, of course, teaches that there is just one God, Allah. Bibliography: Marys,Condee. Segu. Barbara Bray, trans. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987). Kemedijo, Cilas. The Curse of Writing: Genealogical Strata of a Disillusion: Orality, Islam-writing, and Identities in the State of Becoming in Maryse Conde's Segou. Research in African Literatures 27. (1996, December 1): 124.
Numerous intellectuals have debated on the effects that typography has on the mind. An example of two such intellectuals are Walter Ong and Neil Postman. In Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” he describes the difference between oral and typographic cultures and the resulting effects each had on the mind while in Chapter 4 of Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” similarly focuses on how typography has molded the way that we think, which has become very structured and