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.