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The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies
Contributor(s): Saussy, Haun (Author)
ISBN: 0823270475     ISBN-13: 9780823270477
Publisher: Fordham University Press
OUR PRICE:   $33.25  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: March 2016
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Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social
- Technology & Engineering | Social Aspects
Dewey: 808.543
LCCN: 2015036361
Series: Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6" W x 8.9" (0.85 lbs) 274 pages
 
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Publisher Description:

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 "device"--core ideas of modern literary theory--were 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 texts--starting with Homer and the Bible--had 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.


Contributor Bio(s): Saussy, Haun: - Haun Saussy is University Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He won the René Wellek Prize for Comparative Literature (for the second time) for his most recent book, Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (Oxford, 2018). His book The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies (Fordham, 2016) was awarded the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.