Orality and Literacy

by Carlson, Keith Thor

• ISBN13: 9780802098269
• ISBN10: 0802098266
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-30
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

Orality and Literacy investigates the interactions of the oral and the literate through close studies of particular cultures at specific historical moments. Rejecting the 'great-divide' theory of orality and literacy as separate and opposite to one another, the contributors posit that whatever meanings the two concepts have are products of their ever-changing relationships to one another.Through topics as diverse as Aboriginal Canadian societies, Ukrainian-Canadian narratives, and communities in ancient Greece, Medieval Europe, and twentieth-century Asia, these cross-disciplinary essays reveal the powerful ways in which cultural assumptions, such as those about truth, disclosure, performance, privacy, and ethics, can affect a society's uses of and approaches to both the written and the oral. The fresh perspectives in Orality and Literacy reinvigorate the subject, illuminating complex interrelationships rather than relying on universal generalizations about how literacy and orality function.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Map of Selected Place Names	p. viii
Introduction: Reading and Listening at Batoche	p. 3
Questioning Truths
Boasting, Toasting, and Truthtelling	p. 21
Orality about Literacy: The 'Black and White' of Salish History	p. 43
Writing It Down
The Philosopher's Art: Ring Composition and Classification in Plato's Sophist and Hipparchus	p. 73
The Social Lives of Sedna and Sky Woman: Print Textualization from Inuit and Mohawk Oral Traditions	p. 110
Going Public
'Private Stories' in Aboriginal Literature	p. 153
From Family Lore to a People's History: Ukrainian Claims to the Canadian Prairies	p. 177
Subverting Authority
Literacy, Orality, Authority, and Hypocrisy in the Laozi	p. 199
Unstable Texts and Modal Approaches to the Written Word in Medieval European Ritual Magic	p. 217
Uncovering Voices
A Tagalog Awit of the 'Holy War' against the United States, 1899-1902	p. 247
Telling the Untold: Representations of Ethnic and Regional Identities in Ukrainian Women's Autobiographies	p. 280
Contributors	p. 315
Index	p. 319
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.