Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Final Blog

So to join the crowd, I am writing the very cliched yet essential final farewell to this class. Although this semester has been quite hectic, this class has offered a sort of comedic escape thanks to all of the personalities as well as a very educational experience as a result of a very influential professor who knows his stuff. Therefore I sign off, at least for now so as not to dissapoint Tai, with a very gratuitous thanks to everyone for making this class what it was: the ski class where time flew by.


Word of Advice!!!!!


Everyone, remember that your blogs are due by noon on Wednesday so it is about that time to start wrapping them up, dotting all the i's and crossing your t's.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Simply the Best

Perhaps One of my Favorite Passages in All of Our Books


"It is in her voice - I cannot say precisely how it is in her voice - the music of humanity at peace with time, and with the earth, and with mortality. In places where this book breathes more deeply as it tells a story, or when it makes a point in the half-said way of the storyteller, that is where the spirit of a distinguished teacher and teller of myth is present." Kane, p. 24

I don't know why but this passage just struck me. I am unsure whether it is in the way Kane expressed this idea or whether it is the actual point he is making about the storyteller. Whichever it is, the idea of her voice as music and the books breathing is in its simplest form as beautiful as the picture I have chosen to accompany it. There is nothing more beautiful than children gathered around a teacher or storyteller anticipating her first breath that sings the story and breathes life into the book she is reading.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Classes Transcending Their Boundaries

It seems almost as if I can never escape my class on metafiction this semester. As I was researching some of my additional texts for my paper, I came across a passage in Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book that as much as I wanted to, I just could not seem to fit it into my paper. However, I was really compelled by the ideas it presented and their connections with oral traditions.


"'Once upon a time,' began Galip, 'there lived in our city a Prince who discovered that the most important question in life was whether to be, or not to be, oneself.' As he spoke, he felt the Prince's anger rise up in him and transport him to some other body. Who was this other person? As he described the Prince's childhood, he was returned to the Galip he had been during his own childhood. When he went on to describe how the Prince had struggled with his books, he felt as if he were the authors of those books. When he spoke of the days the Prince spent alone in his hunting lodge, he saw himself as the hero in the Prince's own stories. When he described how the Prince dictated his thoughts to his Scribe, he felt himself the author of those thoughts. Because he was telling the Prince's story in the same way he told Celal's stories, he felt himself to be one of Celal's heroes. As he described the Prince's last months, he told himself, This is just how Celal would have told this story - and he hated the others in the room for not knowing this, His fury was eloquent, for the English film crew seemed to understand what he was saying before Iskender translated it. After describing the Prince's end, he went straight back to the beginning: 'Once upon a time, there lived in our city a Prince who discovered that the most important question in life was whether to be, or not to be, oneself.' His voice has lost none of its conviction.

It was only four hours later, when he was back in the City-of-Hearts Apartments, that he realized what set the two tellings apart: The first time he'd told the Prince's story, Celal had still been alive; the second time he'd told it, Celal was lying dead on the floor of the Tesvikiye police station, just a little way down the road from Alaaddin's shop, under a blanket of newsprint. When he was telling the story the second time, he stressed sections he had failed to notice the first time; when he told the story for the third time, it became clear to him that he could be a different person each time he told it. Like the Prince, I tell stories to become myself. Furiously angry at all those who had prevented him from being himself, and certain that it was only by telling stories that he would come to know the mystery of the city and the mystery of life itself, he brought the story to a close for the third and final time, to be met with a white silence that spoke to him of death." p. 416-7

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Expansion Past the Classroom

More on Boundaries
After giving our presentation, as I sat in my room in reflection, I realized that had I not simultaneously been battling with the lines of Shakespeare, memorizing our lines would have created for a more impactful and memorable performance, especially in a class on oral traditions. However, that seems trivial in comparison to how it seemed semi confusing as to what exactly we had to say about boundaries. So here is a brief compilation of some of my favorite sections from the chapter that pertain to not only what we said but also perhaps what we wished we had managed to say.
"Always, the mythtellers speak of a boundary between the Otherworld where life has its source and this world where life has its manifestation. And they speak of how this boundary may, and may not, be crossed." p. 102
"Boundaries are the magic points where worlds impinge." p. 103
"If one thinks of the human body as a bounded entity, one has an idea of what boundary permits and does not permit." p. 103
"Boundaries can also be crossed invisibly. They can be crossed by words, by thoughts, and by spirits." p. 103
"This verbal power makes mythtelling a sacred art, in which the listener is virtually transported by language into the invisible world." p. 104
"Boundaries are marked differently in different mythtelling traditions, but they are always explicit." p. 105
"In this way a central boundary makes other boundaries possible in myth, often creating a complicated hierarchy of realms." p. 106
"Where two worlds come together at a boundary, the point is sacred, often becoming in later ages the focal point of organized religion." p. 107
"The care is necessary: Otherworld personalities resemble human beings in their thinking and behaviour, and they burst spontaneously into the normal world, just as human individuals are always stumbiling into the otherworld. Partly to differentiate these encroaching worlds further, the mythtellers emphasize a change that happens to whoever crosses the boundary between two realms. This change is an important and almost universal event in mythtelling." p. 110
"That change is, at the very least, a physical transfomation; at the most, a death in one world and rebirth in the other." p. 110
"That is because transformation implies, not an existence in one world and then in another; rather it implies existence in both realms simultaneously." p. 110
"One of the dangers is to be trapped in a realm which the traveller does not belong to." p. 111

Saturday, April 18, 2009

My Term Paper

Literary Continuations;

or How Literature Still Remembers Oral Traditions


More so than any other semester, my classes this time around seem to be interconnected in a way that proves almost inescapable. Oral traditions are found in the metafictional books that talk to the reader and instruct them, Tristram Shandy from eighteenth century British literature is discussed in terms of a “cock and bull” story in oral traditions, and the memorization techniques of storytellers that reveal their necessity through implementation aided in remembering countless lines of Shakespeare. However, what compels and intrigues me the most, for I am still very much interested in the subject, was revealed in not only the required literature from my classes, but also in the very limited reading I attempted for my own pleasure. It seemed as if I would never be able to escape the author telling me how to read their story or the never-ending interpretations and application of memory and its importance. For that reason, I am here to ponder the influence of the oral culture and its traditions on literature from the onset of the novel in roughly the eighteenth century until the present day as well as the treatment of memory in this context with the help of Walter Ong and his work Orality and Literacy, The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates, and Sean Kane’s Wisdom of the Mythtellers. I encourage that the reading of this essay be done in a memorably comforting place so the reader does not impose any negative feelings on the text and its reading prior to completion.
Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, Stefen Merrill Block’s The Story of Forgetting, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. These represent a small fraction of the books relevant to my discussion that I have encountered this semester alone. Yet they are perhaps some of the strongest in their application of either the traditional oral “tools” as laid out by Walter Ong and Sean Kane or the treatment of memory as found in The Art of Memory. As I examine these, I hope to enrich your own experience in realizing just how many books rely on the foundations of “oral literature” to convey their message.
Nearly every one of the books I will be using reiterates that writing very rarely and only after sometime, manages to be “put together without the feeling that the one writing is actually speaking aloud” (Ong 26). That is to say that through the incorporation of the author seemingly guiding the reader through the use of asides in his narration or even by simply posing a question, the interpersonal experience of hearing the story from the mouth of the teller proves to be a connection that remains desired. Instead, when writing in the print culture, the author is isolated and alone, forced to imagine his audience and his audience the same in imaging the author (Ong 100-1). Perhaps this may account for what seems like a conversation between the author and the reader.
In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong reveals nine elements that are maintained or exhibited by primary oral cultures; thoughts are additive rather than subordinative, aggregative rather than analytic, redundant, conservative, close to the human lifeworld, agonistically toned, empathetic, homeostatic, and situational (Ong 37-49). Using the aforementioned texts, I am sure that nearly all of these predominantly oral characteristics can be applied to the print culture in a very effective and compelling manner. Also, at least four of these novels demonstrate the notion of boundaries found in chapter three of Wisdom of the Mythtellers. I will illustrate the way in which some of the books that I have chosen pose as exemplary models of written literature that is additive and aggregative.
In Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne succeeds in incorporating the first of Ong’s elements of primary oral cultures into the world of secondary orality. When Ong discusses the use of additive rather than subordinative structure in sentences, he is referring to the less grammatically shaped style with “and” as an integral introductory sentence starter instead of an essential part of a compound sentence (Ong 37-8). The sentences in Sterne’s novel are also very much additive in that they continue on and on and on and on in such a way as this: “To my uncle Mr. Toby Shandy do I stand indebted for the preceding anecdote, to whom my father, who was an excellent natural philosopher, and much given to close reasoning upon the smallest matters, had oft, and heavily complained of the injury….” (Sterne 3). Thoughts are strewn together with little to now subordination.
Thoughts that are aggregative rather than analytic, or to say more cliché than original, appear in oral traditions constantly through both epithets and formulas (Ong 38). Ong reveals that these help cement characters into their roles much like Henry Fielding employs particular names and gestures for certain characters to emphasize their personality differences and their purpose in the work. One such character, Lady Slipslop, is so rightly named not only because of her mismatched appearance, having a nose too long and eyes too small, but also in her poor choice and use of words as when she refers to her lady returning to London very “concisely” (Fielding 7). The gestures of the characters, however, more than the names add to the aggregative style as those practicing some of these in the novel do so nearly every time they are discussed. In this way, the actions of the characters act as the formula by which they are remembered.
As I stated previously, a lot of the books that I have read this semester also incorporate elements from Sean Kane’s chapter on boundaries in his book Wisdom of the Mythtellers. As Kane reveals how “boundaries are the magic points where worlds impinge” he opens up the possibility for my argument that these books themselves can be boundaries (Kane 103). When reading a book, there are two worlds in action, the one in the book and the one the reader is literally in. These books then can act as boundaries, much like the books for a young girl named Liesel Meminger in The Book Thief that allow her to escape the world around her and open up new possibilities for her as she transforms into a stronger version of herself upon reading them. This transformation of sorts is a key element found in this chapter as a life altering experience is most often a result of transcending one boundary (Kane 110).
However, there are boundaries within books as well, one of the most recognizable being the white rabbit hole from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. After Alice passes through, she enters a dream world where everything becomes topsy-turvy. Upon exiting, she can’t remember if it were a dream or reality. All she knows is that she prefers it more than the reality she wakes up to again. Steffen Merrill Block’s The Story of Forgetting also discusses the concept of boundaries that are life-altering as it opens with the affirmation that “alongside this world there’s another. There are places where you can cross” (Block 3). This other world he is talking about, Isidora, offers a fair transition as it is a land where memory does not exist and nothing can be lost.
The notion of memory and the methods for retention of information expressed by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory also appeared in my readings. As we were instructed in class to create a memory palace, I came across in Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book the idea that memory is a garden (Pamuk 3). This reminded me very much of Yates call for the use of an unfrequented church as a memory palace and made me instead desire to find an unfrequented garden with flowers for which I could name. However, with further reading of the book and deeper thought into the notion, I became disheartened. “’When the garden of memory begins to dry up,’ Celal had said, ‘a man cannot but dote on its lingering rosebuds, its last remaining trees. To keep them from withering away, I water them from morning until night, and I caress them too: I remember, I remember so as not to forget!’” (Pamuk 21-2) Even though this reveals that perhaps the withering tendencies of the flowers in a garden would not serve the best purpose as a memory palace, they do offer quite a lovely yet saddening depiction of the loss of one’s memory, a recurring theme in much of the literature I have read. Travels in the Scriptorium reveal a man, in literary reality an author, that willing chooses to have his memory clouded by medication so as to forget the many crimes he has committed through his writing. The Story of Forgetting centers around the disease that makes loved ones forget their most precious memories. In a class that is all about strengthening the memory, I was left pondering the complexities of the reverse far more deeply.
On page seventy eight of Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong refers to Plato’s Socrates who “urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.” Sadly, I would probably have to agree with Plato on this one. That is not to say that simply because someone reads they can’t remember anything. It means that in comparison to the memory capabilities of cultures of primary orality, those that rely on the print world have far less impressive capabilities.
In conclusion, as trite and cliché as it is, to say that the oral traditions have died and been fully consumed by the written and print cultures would be a lie. As Ong put it, “without writing, human consciousness cannot reach its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing” (14). For that reason, many of the same themes and elements of oral “literature” can be found in literature in both its youngest forms and its most recent, which I hope I have managed to convey through this discussion. As much as I would like to think that this is all something new and innovating, I am channeling more conservative or traditionalist oral practices as “the formulas and themes are reshuffled rather than supplanted with new materials” (Ong 42). However, I do hope that what I have given you is at least memorable.



Works Cited
Block, Stefan Merrill. The Story of Forgetting. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks-The Random House Publishing Group, 2008.
Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001.
Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers. Orchard Park: Broadview Press, 1998.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. 1982. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book. Trans. Maureen Freely. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Who We Were!

9 Muses
Thalia - James
Terpsichore - Kevin
Euterpe - Carly
Melpomene - Tai
Caliope - Chris
Urania - Brie
Clio - Kayla
Erato - Rich
Polyhymnia - Danielle

Thursday, April 16, 2009

The Classroom Doors

Group 2: Boundaries

As a group of nine, we accidently happened upon the notion of emboding the nine muses we have been studying since the first day of our class in Oral Traditions. Thanks to Shaman Sexson, we managed to create a skit that I feel embodied the very essence of the chapter on Boundaries found in Sean Kane's Wisdom of the Mythtellers. We called upon boundaries found in familiar children's literature to send us to carefully thought out places that portrayed the combination of the three muses that ventured there. In the end, I think our product was both pleasing and enjoyable while maintaing the ever important instructional qualities we were asked to convey. I don't know, what do you think?




Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Call For HELP!!!!!

Advise Column (I guess it is more of a paragraph form though)

So I have finally figured out what I am going to write my paper about: how literature really is not that far removed from oral traditions. As of yet, I only have my introduction complete and was wondering if it even sounded plausible or compelling or made sense. Please read and offer any feedback, positive or negative. I am a big girl! I can take it.

More so than any other semester, my classes this time around seem to be interconnected in a way that proves almost inescapable. Oral traditions are found in the metafictional books that talk to the reader and instruct them, Tristram Shandy from eighteenth century British literature is discussed in terms of a “cock and bull” story in oral traditions, and the memorization techniques of storytellers that reveal their necessity through implementation aided in remembering countless lines of Shakespeare. However, what compels and intrigues me the most, for I am still very much interested in the subject, was revealed in not only the required literature from my classes, but also in the very limited reading I attempted for my own pleasure. It seemed as if I would never be able to escape the author telling me how to read their story or the never-ending interpretations and application of memory and its importance. For that reason, I am here to ponder the influence of the oral culture and its traditions on literature from the onset of the novel in roughly the eighteenth century until the present day as well as the treatment of memory in this context with the help of Walter Ong and his work Orality and Literacy, The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates, and Sean Kane’s Wisdom of the Mythtellers. I encourage that the reading of this essay be done in a memorably comforting place so the reader does not impose any negative feelings on the text and its reading prior to completion.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Epiphany

So I know that everyone always leaves their classes pondering the question, When am I ever going to use this?

Well, I have learned that what we are learning about memory and memory palaces in oral traditions really can be applied to not only the real world, but also other classes to allow for success.

While memorizing my lines for "The Winter's Tale" by William Shakespeare, I found it much easier to learn them not when we were all sitting around a table stoically reciting the same thing over and over. Instead, with the help of gestures and movements and places visited during the scene, I found it much easier to retain the required information. For that reason, I wanted to extend a big thank you out to you Professor Sexson for teaching me the ways of the memory palace.

Monday, April 6, 2009

More Important Quotes From Ong

"Orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing." p. 14


"Saussure takes the view that writing simply represents spoken language in visible form." p. 17


"Oral poets do not normally work from verbatim memorization of their verse." p. 21


"The meaning of the Greed term 'rhapsodize'...'to stitch song together'...became ominous: Homer stitched together prefabricated parts. Instead of a creator, you had an assembly-line worker." p. 22


"There was no use denying the now known fact that the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained inprinciple to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier - to put it more bluntly, the cliche." p. 23

Thursday, April 2, 2009

The Residue of Words

"Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it its the potential in certain human beings to tell it." p. 11 in Ong's Orality and Literacy