Notes 2/8/2005

Engage the issues of orality and literacy!
Oral--> chirographic--> typographic--> electronic: we are back into the world of images (secondary orality)

Religion associated with the Book

Group Presentations: We are to become the world's leading experts on our cahpter in Kane. Each chapter is prefaced with a text. Your group should do an oral performatnce/interpretation of that text. Dnce it, sing it, recite it...but incorporate it. You have two responsibilities in your presentation 1) Be instructive 2) Entertain us!!!!

Language itself is a technology. Both pages 78 in Ong and 38 in Yates discuss the idea that writing destroys memory. Writing ruins people.

Books are dictatorial and imperialistic because they do not offer a dialect. "Truth" can only be acheived from a question and answer session. Books do not offer this as an option.

Every technology is a mixed blessing. There is good and bad. The use of the mind as a storage place for memories and stories can save lives as illustrated by the survivors of the Holocuast and the success of Scherezade in Arabian Nights.

Another Passage from Ong
*pg 33 "An oral culture has no texts." The definition of text to Ong is very dfferent than the definition of text that say Derrida or Saussure would give. In Ong's view, a text is something written down. In an oral culture this cannot happen.

A sentence on pg 20 about "verbomotor" was also brought up to illustrate that language does not conform to confining definitions. Different languages have different words for the same objects. Some languages have words for concepts, states of being, and expressions that we have no equivilant to match.

Kane Passage
*pg 34 "Myths in tehir original form- it wasa form very much like improvised music- opened their tellers to the proper subject of myth." Within myth and oral traditions we get the music of ordinary conversation. Rap artists do a similar kind of musical magic.

The calss now demonstates well know jingles. "Kleen King, Kleen King..." "Working together! First National Pawn!" :O)

Think memorable thoughts!!!! What is a memorable thought compared to a thought that is not memorable?