Orality and Literacy in Modern Italian Culture (Legenda Italian Perspectives) - Hardcover

Caesar, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1904350739 ISBN 13: 9781904350736

Publisher: Routledge, 2006

Synopsis

In our highly literate culture, orality is all-pervasive. Different kinds of media and performance - theatre, film, television, story-telling, structured play - make us ask what is the relation between improvisation and pre-meditation, between transcription and textualization, between rehearsal, recollection and re-narration. The challenge of writing orality has a technical side - how do young writers 'represent' the spoken language of their contemporaries? What are the rules governing the transcription of oral evidence in fiction and non-fiction - but also a political and philosophical one: is the relationship between oral and written always a hierarchical one? Does the textualization of the oral destroy, more than it commemorates or preserves, the oral itself? Twelve wide-ranging essays explore these questions in the most up-to-date account of orality and literacy in modern Italian culture yet produced.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Caesar is Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Birmingham.

Review

Other strands link the twelve essays: one centres on the idea that ‘voice’ is something vulnerable and short-lived, while another focuses on the ‘hierarchy’ implicit in the relationship between orality and literacy. Both are demonstrated, for instance, when ‘folk’, ‘women’s’ and ‘youth’ cultures are ‘textualised’ and thus potentially destroyed, rather than preserved, in writing, leading to the hypothesis that ‘orality’ is, essentially, irreproducible as ‘literacy’. (unsigned notice Forum for Modern Language Studies, 46.2, 2010, 247-48)

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1904350739
• ISBN 13: 9781904350736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 184