Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Test 1, Feb 22 notes

Hey these are my notes I made (from class, peer pages and reading) and used for the test, just in case this is still useful to anyone for the midterm or whatnot



♣Oral Traditions- Test Review Feb22-05-
Ong Chpt 1-3
Yates Chpt 1-3
Kane Prologue & Chpt 1
Class discussion- 1-25 bold #’s are test ?’s from peers

2. Words are defined in an oral culture through gesticulations, facial expressions, vocal inflections etc.
Logos- the spoken wordPrimary Orality: a culture that has never been exposed to the written word
4. Chirographic: a culture that writes but does not have access to mass literature
5. Typographic: mass distribution of books
6. Loci- Latin for ‘place’, where you story memory palace images ( places and images = loci and imagines- used by roman rhetors)- Cicero
two other descriptions of classical mnemonic:
anonymous-Ad C. Herennium libri IV; five parts of rhetoric
& Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria: relate ideas to place in a building

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) – father of modern linguistics: words are made up of sounds: Phonemes
Only 106 languages throughout history have been committed to writing- only 78 of the 3000 languages today produce literature.
Metrodorus of Scepsis- brought the stars into memory pg. 39 Yates
Grapholect: a transdialectal language formed by deep commitment to writing

13. Compare Primary Orality and Secondary Orality to putting “the car before the horse” – going backwards-never having known the world without writing means you can’t understand the true mode of language. –literary residue

Hexameter Line: made up of formulas of word units – Parry Homer in hexameter line

8. Rhapsodize: “To stitch together song” – greek “weave”
9. Text – to “weave”, pulling strands together

- Alexander Pope wrote “An Essay on Criticism” which set the standard for society in the Romantic age to value the quality of poetry on its being Totally Original. / Millman Perry’s (who has revolutionized orality/poetic structure for Homeric studies) study of Homers’ Illiad and Odyssey disproved this by say that these works of art are mostly repeated cliché and style and form of other works- this is important because in an oral culture formulaic patterns had to be used to remember knowledge.
- Greeks interiorized writing, making rememberence unimportant. This was around Plato’s time (427-347 BC) that the alphabet was made- but writing was not completely popular until around 720-700BC : this is the reason why Plato ignored poets in his work- the traditional poet was outmoded by the chirographic world. *Greek civilization marks the period when writing clashed with orality.

Whitman (1958)- Iliad structured to repeat at the end of the episode the elements from the beginning of the episode – Chinese puzzle, boxes within boxes

-greeks introduced vowels to the alphabet

Hebrew “dabar” = word & event

Words are Not Signs- it is a secondary model system
Iconography

3. What activities put us in contest with nature: Agriculture- building fence/harbor seeds/tether animal

Luddite: against new technology (Robert Ludd)
Anamnesis: ‘recollection’, Plato’s Phaedrus
Anrathia: ‘forgetfulness’
Ecolalia: “baby talk”

1. singing is referred to as a text (sing in me, Muse…)
7. Anima- latin for ‘soul/spirit’ – bringing to life
10. Gesang ist dasein- ‘song is existance’11. Paratactic- additive/ Syntactic- subordinative
12. White berries = practical wisdom/ oral stories are practical
14. There is no such thing as a story, only the idea of a story- it exists while being told
15. “How do you know what you think until you see what you say?” W.H. Auden- motto of a print culture
16. Agon – Greek for “battle”, having to do with Ong’s Flyting – oral culture is agonistically toned
21. Tabula Rossa, ‘blank slate’ –as we age more of our knowledge is erased
22. Aristotilian- Induction (blank slate) / Platonic- recollection/remembering- Plato would say that we are born with a full slate-not blank
23. Mnemotechnics or more interestingly: the art of memory Ram’s Testicles
25. Natural memory (born with it) and Artificial memory ( memory strengthened by training)

20. What virtue is memory a part of? Prudence
17. Mnemosyne-mother of the muses



Ongs 9 Ideas: of a primary oral culture

Additive rather than subordinate
Biblical ‘ands’ – original bible form compared to new- ‘Written discourse develops more elaborate and fixed grammar than oral discourse does’
Aggregative (grouping/clustering) rather than analytic
(18. ) Epithets and clichés in their grab-bag of formulas - ex: clever odysseus, brave soldier, beautiful princess etc. –important for remembrance-association
Redundant (unnecessary) or ‘copious’
Say the same thing, slightly differently, many times, acoustical practicality- Oral : to keep on track one must backloop to previous thoughts- so that speaker and audience does not loose thought process.
Conservative or traditionalist
Formulas are reshuffled rather than supplemented with new material- oral culture is of a conservative mind set- important to remember and re-tell the old- the wise old man or woman is highly esteemed, new ideas rarely weave themselves into knowledge- only new ways of telling stories-communicating.
Close to the human lifeworld
Only lists or facts are those associated with humans (list of ships)- everything is centralized- everyday things are put into memory/ ‘abstract description embedded in a narrative’ - apprenticeship (Iliad passage)
Agonistically toned
Verbal tongue-lashing, praising, keeps conflicts external, not internal- competitions: ( 24. ) –Flyting: free-style rapping, poetry recitation, debating on topic, David and Goliath.
Empathic and participatory rather than objectively distanced
Writing involves personal disengagement and objectivity;
-orality = ‘communal soul’ communication to the audience from the speaker
Homeostatic: oral society of the present- live in the present, discarding memories that are no longer relevant; do keep some words that no longer have meaning in ceremony; integrity of past is subordinate to integrity of present; oral traditions reflect a society’s present cultural values rather than idle curiosity about the past.
Situational rather than abstract
Hammer, saw, log, hatchet- see moon/plate rather than a circle
A moderate degree of literacy drastically affects thought processes
9 Muses and Functions

Calliope (Epic Poetry)
Clio (History)
Erato (Love Poetry)
Euterpe (Music)
Melpomene (Tragedy)
Polyhymnia (Sacred Poetry)
Terpsichore (Dancing)
Thalia (Comedy)
Urania (Astronomy)

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