The ethnography of rhythm : orality and its technologies / Haun Saussy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Saussy, Haun, 1960- author.

Series:

Verbal arts--studies in poetics

Verbal arts: studies in poetics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Oral tradition.

Poetics.

Orality in literature.

Storytelling.

Folk literature--History and criticism.

Folk literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xv, 251 pages ; 23 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2016.

Summary:

"Who 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"-- Provided by publisher.

"A history of the concept of orality (that is, the creation and transmission of literary works without the use of writing), this book shows awareness of this medium emerging from the encounter of many literary and scientific developments (romanticism, post-symbolism, structuralism; physiology, psychology, the study of expression, anthropology; phonography, cinema)"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note:

Preface

Introduction: Weighing Hearsay

1. Poetry Without Poems or Poets

"Two or Three Hundred Rhythmic Formulae

Festivals of Rhythm

The Oral Style

Formula as System

Langue, Parole, and Constraint

2. Writing as One Form of Notation

The Epic Cyborg

"Word for Word"

Stitches in Time

3. Autography

The Inscribing Ear

"Speech is a Movement"

The Patois of Parnassus

A Difference of Fifteen Cycles

4. The Human Gramophone

"Errores Modernistarum"

The Gospel of Movement

A Bone Gallery

"Four Obscure Jews"

Gallo-Galilean Civilization

5. Embodiment and Inscription

Materials Science

Techniques of the Body

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823270460

0823270467

9780823270477

0823270475

OCLC:

914326210