I thought I'd mention that the journal Oral Tradition, published since 1986, has become a free online journal. While articles are distributed as PDF files, the journal allows for the inclusion of digital components. I mention this because, as some of you know, I think the study of oral traditions, especially in regards to issues of media dynamics such as materiality and performance, have much to tell us about the study of digital texts and vise versa. In fact, immediately after browsing the most recent issues of Oral Tradition, I experienced Daniel Anderson's performance of “Where I’m At,” and I was struck by the connections. In the last three issues of OT there are multiple articles on poetry readings as performance; on oral performance and the visual; and on transcribing, reading, and representing oral performance in print and digital forms. As I experienced Dan’s performance of “Where I’m At,” I couldn't help but think of it as poetic performance which is, in fact, part of an emerging oral tradition.
While John Miles Foley identified four types of oral "poems" determined by their media dynamics (Oral Performance: poems orally composed for oral performance and aural reception; Voiced Texts: poems written for oral performance and aural reception (such as slam poetry); Voices from the Past: poems which may have been composed orally or in writing for oral or written performance and aural or written reception (such as The Odyssey and Beowulf); and Written Oral Poems: poems written in the oral tradition for the purpose of being read), I see Dan's piece falling into a new category. Dan’s new media poem was clearly composed for watching as well as hearing. While the visual has often played an important if understudied role in oral performance, Dan's piece is a different sort of visual and oral performance. The differences in media dynamics are important here: In addition to the visual aspects and the aural reception of Dan's piece (though not a live performance), as a new media text, the mashup and sampling are foregrounded in a way they're often not in earlier oral traditions. (I say this while at the same time while fully recognizing that the mashup and sampling have always been a part of oral tradition. In fact, it might just be that we find these elements foregrounded in new media because we're too accustomed to the logic of print.)
My point, however, is that once again I'm struck by how oral tradition studies and new media studies can speak to one another just as long as we're willing to listen.
Almost as a meta comment to my own post, I want to point out that I decided to use the phrase “experience Dan’s performance” rather than using “watch” or “listen” to it. While we go to “see” plays and movies and while we “watch” television, for most of us, we’re listening as well as viewing the performance. We don’t have a term that includes both. People like Ong, working within the phenomenological tradition, have been dealing with issues like this for decades (see, for instance, “’I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect.” Human Inquiries 10.1-3 (1970): 22-42; Rpt. in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 122-44), and yet we still don’t pay enough attention to these issues. Materiality and performance studies, while growing, are still largely niche specialties within both literary studies and rhetoric and composition. I’d love to seem more interaction and cross-disciplinary work taking place.
Hmm…I wonder if I could get Anne Wysocki and John Miles Foley on the same panel sometime.
Crossposted to Machina Memorialis.
on the oral tradition
Thanks for the link and news John. I'm teaching Beowulf as part of an intro to brit lit and while I have superficial, at best, understanding and knowledge about oral literature and the oral formulaic and the oral tradition, this is a great help to me and students. This is the sort of thing that makes the internet great!
bradley || bleckblog.org
More on Oral Tradition Studies and Technorhetoric
Bradley,
Oral-formulaic theory is but one oral tradition. Technically, much of the material you'd cover in the medieval section of an Intro to British Literature course is part of oral tradition, including clearly literate texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer (think of them as "voiced texts" like contemporary slam poetry).
I forgot to mention it in my post, but John Miles Foley's How to Read an Oral Poem is a great introduction to oral tradition(s) and the (currently) important issues in Oral Traditions Studies, including media dynamics, performance theory, ethnopoetics, and "immanent art" (the study of how a poem or text works). All of these are highly applicable to studying a new media piece such as Dan's "Where I'm At." As I've said many times, I've found Oral Tradition Studies to be important to my thinking about digital texts/culture, and the field has undergone dramatic changes since Ong's Orality and Literacy, which is where most of us technorhetoricans get our understanding of oral tradition. Foley's book, written to be an undergraduate textbook, is a great introduction, covering a wide range of oral traditions (he beings with "four scenarios": a Tibetian paper-singer, a North American slam poet, a South African praise-poet, and an ancient Greek bard). A good introduction to performance theory is Ruth Finnegan's "The How of Literature" from Oral Tradition 20.2.
Also potentially useful for your teaching, if you're interested, is Mark C. Amodio's Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England. The first chapter, "The Medieval English Oral-Literate Nexus," should provide enough information to address some of these issues as they relate to an Intro to British Lit course. I'm also very partial to John Niles' Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. The first three chapters, "Making Connections," "Somatic Communication," and "Poetry as Social Praxis" would also be quite useful.
Quite frankly, I think Nile's central claim, that we are Homo Narrans, is as applicable to rhetoric and composition as it is to literature. He writes:
It all depends upon how we define story. As I teach both my composition and my literature students, we can't get away from story. To write a set of directions is to write a story. To analyze your target audience is to write a story about who they are. To define something is to place it into a context and that context is a story. But then, I subscribe to the theory of embodied philosophy (a.k.a. embodied cognition) which posits that the laws of thought are metaphorical, and when you get right down to it, metaphor is itself the parabolic projection of one story onto another (see, for instance, Mark Turner's The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language and Turner's and Gilles Fauconnier's The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities).
To bring this back to a technorhetorical subject, I'll conclude by noting that the reason I find Oral Tradition Studies so useful for thinking about digital culture because it's delved deeply into complex issues of media dynamics and materiality over the past 20 years or so, and Oral Tradition Studies even considers the visual. ("What's visual about an oral poem?" you ask. Lots, is the answer. For instance, there's how it's performed -- drama has its origins in oral performance, especially but not exclusively ritual oral performance. And then there's mental, and verbal imagery (graphic imagery, I suggest, is already included in performance). We could also talk about issues of space and time. As I've argued before, there's nothing new about multimedia, and the history of multimedia goes well beyond opera. It goes back to the origins of oral performance itself.
great stuff
Thanks again John. Now all I have to do is find/make the time to read all this!
bradley || bleckblog.org