Articles Tagged with Orality
'Blasts of Language': Changes in Oral Poetics in Britain Since 1965
This article examines how oral performances of poetry have proliferated over the past forty years to become an essential part of the writing and distribution of poetry in the UK. Our analysis of this phenomenon involves historical research and suggests new ways of looking at the construction of poetic meaning. We draw on interviews with practitioners from diverse poetry communities in considering how performance challenges the exclusive emphasis on the silent, printed text in existing histories of English language poetry.
Read more »Elaborate Versionings: Characteristics of Emergent Performance in Three Print/Oral/ Aural Poets
Literary studies regards the "poetry reading" as a marginal phenomenon. By resituating the published poems of Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, and Cecilia Vicuña in performance contexts, this essay proposes that each reading has the dimensions of an emergent performance, with distinguishable oral dynamics. The poet-performers break through into performativity by means of elaboration and versioning. This dynamic activity practice presents a challenge to the dominant practices of literary criticism and the scholarship of print texts.
Read more »Keeping the Word: On Orality and Literacy (With a Sideways Glance at Navajo)
Taking Walter Ong’s work as a starting point, this paper begins with a brief survey of the literature on orality and literacy and goes on to analyze a number of Ong’s assertions within the framework of Navajo interactions with orality and literacy, thus illustrating that certain foundational concepts––such as that of “kept language”––need to be reconsidered. The paper pays special attention to the emergence of Navajo poetry; rather than “orality” and “literacy” being singular concepts, this analysis argues that these concepts must be understood within the cultural practices and linguistic ideologies from which they emerge.
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