Orality and Literacy : 30th Anniversary Edition.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE -- BEFORE ONGISM -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- Introduction -- 1 The orality of language -- The literate mind and the oral past -- Did you say 'oral literature'? -- 2 The modern discovery of primary oral cultures -- Early awareness of oral tradition -- The Homeric question -- Milman Parry's discovery -- Consequent and related work -- 3 Some psychodynamics of orality -- Sounded word as power and action -- You know what you can recall: mnemonics and formulas -- Further characteristics of orally based thought and expression -- (i) Additive rather than subordinative -- (ii) Aggregative rather than analytic -- (iii) Redundant or 'copious' -- (iv) Conservative or traditionalist -- (v) Close to the human lifeworld -- (vi) Agonistically toned -- (vii) Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced -- (viii) Homeostatic -- (ix) Situational rather than abstract -- Oral memorization -- Verbomotor lifestyle -- The noetic role of heroic 'heavy' figures and of the bizarre -- The interiority of sound -- Orality, community and the sacral -- Words are not signs -- 4 Writing restructures consciousness -- The new world of autonomous discourse -- Plato, writing and computers -- Writing is a technology -- What is 'writing' or 'script'? -- Many scripts but only one alphabet -- The onset of literacy -- From memory to written records -- Some dynamics of textuality -- Distance, precision, grapholects and magnavocabularies -- Interactions: rhetoric and the places -- Interactions: learned languages -- Tenaciousness of orality -- 5 Print, space and closure -- Hearing-dominance yields to sight-dominance -- Space and meaning -- (i) Indexes -- (ii) Books, contents and labels -- (iii) Meaningful surface -- (iv) Typographic space -- More diffuse effects -- Print and closure: intertextuality.

Post-typography: electronics -- 6 Oral memory, the story line and characterization -- The primacy of the story line -- Narrative and oral cultures -- Oral memory and the story line -- Closure of plot: travelogue to detective story -- The 'round' character, writing and print -- 7 Some theorems -- Literary history -- New Criticism and Formalism -- Structuralism -- Textualists and deconstructionists -- Speech-act and reader-response theory -- Social sciences, philosophy, biblical studies -- Orality, writing and being human -- 'Media' versus human communication -- The inward turn: consciousness and the text -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX -- AFTER ONGISM -- REFERENCES FOR HARTLEY CHAPTERS -- INDEX FOR HARTLEY CHAPTERS.

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures and offers a brilliantly lucid account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. The 3rd edition sees the addition of a short preface, further reading section, and essay-style afterword focusing on how orality and literacy has changed in relation to modern media, and how the idea of the 'evolution of consciousness' can be taken up anew in the light of recent work, from John Hartley.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.