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The ethnography of rhythm : orality and its technologies / Haun Saussy

Author
Saussy, Haun, 1960-
Published
New York : Fordham University Press, [2016]
Edition
First edition.
Physical Description
xv, 251 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

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Contents
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.
Summary
"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"--
"A history of the concept of orality (that is, the creation and transmission of literary works without the use of writing), this book shows awareness of this medium emerging from the encounter of many literary and scientific developments (romanticism, post-symbolism, structuralism; physiology, psychology, the study of expression, anthropology; phonography, cinema)"--
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Genre(s)
ISBN
9780823270460 (hardback)
0823270467 (hardback)
9780823270477 (paper)
0823270475 (paper)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Source of Acquisition
Purchased with funds from the Renee Cohen Friedman and Robert S. Friedman Libraries Endowment; 2016
Endowment Note
Renee Cohen Friedman and Robert S. Friedman Libraries Endowment
View MARC record | catkey: 19178515