1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910798420703321

Autore

Saussy Haun

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Fordham University Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

0-8232-7050-5

0-8232-7051-3

0-8232-7049-1

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

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

Collana

Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics

Classificazione

LIT006000SOC002010TEC052000

Disciplina

808.5/43

Soggetti

Folk literature - History and criticism

Storytelling

Orality in literature

Poetics

Oral tradition

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

"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.