Orality and the Problem of Memory Essay examples - 1052 Words

Orality and the Problem of Memory A professor of mine once posed the question: â€Å"What do you truly know?† My obvious initial response was, â€Å"What do you mean, what do I know? Isn’t that why I’m here? To expand upon the wealth of knowledge that I already know?† After tossing the question around for a few days, I finally realized what she was getting at--knowledge equals experience, and experience promotes memory. In today’s culture of hypertext and cyberspace, the opportunities for experiential learning are becoming a thing of the past. The bard has been replaced by digital and virtual technology that effectively stores the information we need to know into a confined space, thus giving the modern literate a license to forget. The†¦show more content†¦In oral culture, everyone experiences the Iliad. The images and meters are constructed so that they become a part of the audience’s collective reality. The images contained within an epic represent large- scale visual aids. â€Å"Each epic consists of a sequence of scenes or situations that serve to map the action of the narrative† (25). These sequences are linked together to form patterns that serve as the foundation for memory. The relevance of the knowledge imparted through memory is dependent upon the various themes that arise in the bard’s tale. â€Å"Themes usually depict events, such as assemblies, journeys, and battles† (18). Situational relevance dictates how each person will experience the Iliad. Though the interpretations may be different, the experience is still translated into the collective consciousness. If oral culture commemorates the situation through experience (or experiential learning), how can print culture map an experience to commit it to memory? We moderns regard memory as a container filled with information, a notion strongly reinforced by the terminology of our computer culture, with its â€Å"hard drives,† â€Å"RAM,† and â€Å"databases.† This notion, however, originated long before computers, with the spread of literacy, for writing enables us to convey the same information, with the same truth value, to different people in different times and places. On this account, it fosters what we might call a â€Å"textual† model ofShow MoreRelated Pre-literacy and Modern Vestiges1250 Words   |  5 Pagesthought by some to be analogous to a modern day textbook lesson, in which students learn mathematics, grammar, and law, all by the written word. So is the contention of Homeric scholar Eric A. Havelock. As Hobart and Schiffman state in Orality and the Problem of Memory, Everywhere he looked in Homer, Havelock saw a wealth of instruction. For instance, the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad embodies for him a wide range of subliminal Read MoreThe Mind And Page : Remedial Writers And Cognitive Reductionism By Mike Rose968 Words   |  4 Pagesreached Piaget’s Formal Operational Stage; however, Rose points out that we cannot assume that there is a connection between a student demonstrating formal-operational thoughts and the ability â€Å"to produce coherent, effective discourse† (346). The Orality-Literacy theory discusses how the introduction of literacy in a society affects the way a society thinks. There is a relationship between the modes of communication and the modes of thought. Rose claims that eliminating illiteracy would not affectRead More Samuel Taylor Coleridge Essay1981 Words   |  8 Pagesinability or reluctance to find a definable meaning for this poem began to disappear in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Up until this time, patterns of meaning emerged, however, as meanings came to be, their very plurality became a problem. For some it symbolized a religious et hic poem; for others, it was a psychological, even autobiographical, study of guilt and terror on behalf of Coleridge’s life. Lastly, there were those individuals who felt that the poem was concerned with philosophyRead MoreA Survey Of Related Literature3008 Words   |  13 Pagesevidence and faith and proposes the use of inductive historical method rather than the â€Å"scientific† historical-critical method. Thus, he stated, â€Å"We must first appreciate the importance of the doctrine of the resurrection. We must make clear the problem of faith and history that so much colors the contemporary discussion. Then our primary aim is to try to explain the rise of the resurrection faith.† He also treats the Nature of the Gospels and the Witness of the Gospels. The Nature ofRead MoreEssay about The Mexican Tlaltelolco Massacre2491 Words   |  10 PagesWithin Elena Poniatowska’s body of work are a compilation of oral histories and photographs. Although Poniatowska’s work is different from the other two authors, they all share the same goal of displaying a search for truth, an importance of their memory, and insisting that the reader pay attention and always remember. I intend to display how the author uses a variety of techniques to represent and achieve the chronicler position. At the same time, I will attempt to answer the following questions:Read MoreDub Poetry in and from Jamaica9895 Words   |  40 Pagesof the people. At that time the slaves’ memory was sufficient to preserve cultural and historical information (cf. Habekost 1993b: 70). Today the dub poets develop their poems further along the lines of the traditional features of orality. But due to urbanisation and the rapid technological advance, the body of oral tradition is shrinking to a smaller repertoire and the mentioned traditional forms are transferred into more contemporary forms of orality, making use of technology and the increasingRead MoreKubla Khan Essay4320 Words   |  18 Pageswishes to avoid the extremes of the positions of Abrams and Schneider, nevertheless comes much closer in her conclusions to the latter than to the former. Opium, she argues, can only work On what is already there in a mans mind and memory, and, if he already has a creative imagination and a tendency to reverie, dreams and hypnologic visions, then opium may intensify and focus his perceptions. Her final verdict -- which can be no more than a hypothesis -- is that the actionRead MoreSupporting the Development of English Literacy in English Language Learner s22851 Words   |  92 Pagessecond-language reading. Fitzgerald (1999, p. 22) notes that â€Å"...these correlational studies do not provide support either for the position that English orality must precede English reading or vice versa.† She 5 maintains that findings are mixed, and the direction of the relationships has not been fully investigated. Furthermore, she cites evidence that orality and literacy can develop together (Fitzgerald Noblit, 1999). A recent study by Geva and Petrulis-Wright (1999) confirms the position that oral