Who We Were!

9 Muses

Thalia - James

Terpsichore - Kevin

Euterpe - Carly

Melpomene - Tai

Caliope - Chris

Urania - Brie

Clio - Kayla

Erato - Rich

Polyhymnia - Danielle

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?

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.

I really hope you can read this because it is funny!!!

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.

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

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