The Ethnography of Rhythm : Orality and Its Technologies / Haun Saussy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Saussy, Haun, Author.

Series:

Verbal arts--studies in poetics.

Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Folk literature--History and criticism.

Folk literature.

Storytelling.

Orality in literature.

Poetics.

Oral tradition.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 254 pages) : illustrations, music

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2016.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

"Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Figures

Introduction: Weighing Hearsay

1. Poetry Without Poems or Poets

2. Writing as (One Form of) Notation

3. Autography

4. The Human Gramophone

5. Embodiment and Inscription

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-246) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

0-8232-7050-5

0-8232-7051-3

0-8232-7049-1

OCLC:

939196035