The Ethnography of Rhythm Orality and Its Technologies [Paperback]

Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies

Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the devicecore ideas of modern literary theorywere 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 textsstarting with Homer and the Biblehad 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.

Only Haun Saussywith his historical range, theoretical breadth, and fine close-readingcould have pulled off this brilliant comparative history of 'the perturbation caused by the idea of oral literature.' The disciplinary range of this dazzling scholarly performance takes us from linguistics and philology to ethnography and religious studies, from physiology and psychiatry to the history of graphic and sound technologies. Be prepared to marveland learn....scholars working across a wide range of fields of literary and linguistic study will find a wealth of insight here.Saussys finely detailed scholarship is of import to both folklorists and literary scholars, each of whom has something to learn from thel#[