Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

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THE MODERN DISCOVERY OF
PRIMARY ORAL CULTURES
EARLY AWARENESS OF ORAL TRADITION
The new awakening in recent years to the orality of speech was
not without antecedents. Several centuries before Christ, the
pseudonymous author of the Old Testament book that goes by his
Hebrew nom de plume, Qoheleth (‘assembly speaker’), or its Greek
equivalent, Ecclesiastes, clearly adverts to the oral tradition on
which his writing draws: ‘Besides being wise, Qoheleth taught the
people knowledge, and weighed, scrutinized, and arranged many
proverbs. Qoheleth sought to find pleasing sayings, and to write
down true sayings with precision’ (Ecclesiastes 12:9–10).
‘Write down…sayings.’ Literate persons, from medieval
florilegia collectors to Erasmus (1466–1536) or Vicesimus Knox
(1752–1821) and beyond, have continued to put into texts sayings
from oral tradition, though it is significant that at least from the
Middle Ages and Erasmus’ age, in western culture at least, most
collectors culled the ‘sayings’ not directly from spoken utterance
but from other writings. The Romantic Movement was marked by
concern with the distant past and with folk culture. Since then,
hundreds of collectors, beginning with James McPherson (1736–
96) in Scotland, Thomas Percy (1729–1811) in England, the Grimm
brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) in
Germany, or Francis James Child (1825–96) in the United States,
have worked over parts of oral or quasi-oral or near-oral tradition
more or less directly, giving it new respectability. By the start of
the twentieth century, the Scottish scholar Andrew Lang (1844–
1912) and others had pretty well discredited the view that oral
folklore was simply the left-over debris of a ‘higher’ literary