Test Prep Class 3/31/2005

The test will cover Ong 4,5,6 and Yates 6, 7, 8; the "Re-membering Finnegan" article; and all class notes and performances. Please also visit Hanna, Nikole, and Opai's sites for notes.
Hanna: http://killernotes.blogspot.com/
Nikole: http://www.geocities.com/nikoledidier/index2.html
Opai: http://www.geocities.com/apabritabasu/

EPIC POEMS
1. What is it about Nikole that makes her every guy's wish? She likes to fish.

2. Wayne is the brain, we si-i-ing of Wayne. Kristi's poem.

3. What model did Tracy use for repetition? Leviticus, if read in the context of oral traditions it is hypnotizing.

4. Valerie swears the fish was "this big". Used the Odyssey as a model and had a theatrical and highly structured presentation.

5. Wayne used the pantoum structure as an inspiration. It is a structure that ensures that at the poem's conslusion every line has been repeated twice.

6. What, according to Aristotle, is the difference between an epic and a tragedy? Epics- episodic, redundant, too copious. Tragedy- coherently unified, short and organic with a single focus. Aristotle would like the Reader's Digest Condensed versions of books.

7. The reigning perfect peice of literature (if we believe Aristotle) for the 19th and 20th centuries is the Detective Story. It has conventions similar in all versions: murder, 'who dun it?', through Process Of Elimination we get the answer. Ong pg 144-148.

8. Ong pg 139 discussion of Freytag's pyramid.

9. What word could one use to sum up Finnegans Wake? Either mememorme, or, remember.

10. Who is the mad grandmother who stutters? GGRAMAD, Grammar, Geometry, Rhetoric, Arithmatic, Music, Astronomy, Dialectic. The 7 liberal arts.

11. The words 'in medias res' mean in the middle of things. Oral traditions begin in the middle contrary to Aristotle's ideal story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

12. What epithet of Homer's which refers to women is used most often? of the lovely cheeks

13. "Amathia" means forgetting, to forget everything that is important. To be truly sinful is to be forgetful.

14. According to Ong, how does one authenticate a written document if one has just entered a literate/written culture? attach a symbolic object such as a sword, pg 96 in Ong

15. Ong discusses the issue of typographic space as in Easter Wings. The poem in this case takes on the shape of wings on the page. Ong page 126

16. Ong Chapter 4 is titled "Writing Resturctures Consciousness". What does that title mean? Idea that when you enter a written culture your consciousness is (and must be) completely restructured.

17. Corrections as Ong discusses them on pg 103. Oral performers do not admit mistakes or draw attention to them.

18. Ong's discussion of Plato on pg 103. Plato wrote in dialogue form, one person talking to another, yet, the dialogues are written texts NOT transcriptions of actual discussions.

19. Ong on pg 104 discusses that writing introduces introspectivity into our culture. With it, we became more interior and isolated. Also, on pg 106 Oral cultures are not hung up with spell checkers and dictionaries. Ong discusses the fantasy that language and the alphabet have to operate in ONE way only.

20. Ong pg 123... in the new world the book is a thing, not an utterance.

21. Ong pg 141: lengthy and climactic plot comes into being only with writing. pg 142: there is an incompatibility between the linear plot and oral memory, the thought of Epos is in remembered tradition. pg 144: ex/ the non-linear Marienbad. Print gives the need for closure.
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Dr. Sexson will send an email to us regarding what to study from Yates and any more Ong that he wishes us to ponder. I just received mine (1:15 Saturday afternoon).

Here is what he adds to these notes:

337 students: Please add the following areas of concern from Ong and Yates as preparation for the test on Tuesday.Ong, p. 145: Which gives us the firmest sense of "closure" : (a) print (b) writing (c) oral performance (d) filmOng: p. 146: Who else, besides Salman Rushdie, felt the need to declaim the written novel in order to reclaim the feel for the old orla narrator's world?Ong, 147. According to 2Corinthians, the spirit gives life, but the letter ________Ong, p. 148: The "round" character is valued most by which tradition, the oral or the written?Overwhelmingly, the symbols of Camillo's theatre tend to be from: (a) classical myth and the zodiad; (b) the Bible (c) the underworld images of the Middle Ages (d) Virgil's Aeneid.Read carefully the last paragraph of page 172 in Art of Memory and be prepared to answer questions about what a "Renaissance plan of the psyche" might mean.
Lull: be able to answer questions about Ramon Lull and his memory system as it relates to (a) neoplatonism (b) the abstract vs. images (c) movement (d) the Cabala (Kaballah). Google the term Cabala for more information.