Vox Intexta : Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages

Alger N. Doane

ISBN 10: 0299130940 / ISBN 13: 9780299130947

Published by University Of Wisconsin Press Mär 1997, 1997

About this Item

Neuware - One of the world s leading film theorists, Rudolf Arnheim has been well known to readers of English since the publication of his classic Film as Art in 1957. This is the first English translation of another of his important books, Kritiken und Aufsatze zum Film, which collects both film reviews and theoretical essays, most of them written between 1925 and 1940. As a young man in 1920s Berlin, Arnheim began writing about film for the satirical magazine Das Stachelschwein. In 1928, as the Weimar Republic began to crumble, he joined the intellectual weekly Die Weltbuhne as film critic and assistant editor for cultural affairs. His most important contributions to both magazines are published here, including witty and incisive comments on many of the great classics of the silent and early sound period, such as Buster Keaton s The General and Fritz Lang s Metropolis. With the advent of Nazism in Germany, Arnheim emigrated first to Italy, where he wrote essays (many included here) for a nascent Enciclopedia del Cinema, and then to England and the United States. The thirty essays on film theory discuss elements of theory and technique, early sound film, production, style and content, and the relationship of film and the state. The fifty-six critical pieces include Arnheim s thoughts on the practice of film criticism, his reviews of German, American, French, and Soviet films, and his profiles of Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Felix Bressart, Erich von Stroheim, and others. Also included in the volume are an introduction (newly revised by Arnheim) and a comprehensive bibliography.'.

Seller Inventory # 9780299130947

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Vox Intexta : Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages
• Publisher: University Of Wisconsin Press Mär 1997
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299130940
• ISBN 13: 9780299130947
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 230W x 154H x 18D millimeters 230 millimeters width by 154 millimeters height by 18 millimeters depth
• Weight: 417 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Vox intexta brings together interrelated essays on vital aspects of oral production and reception in Western European medieval contexts, seen from modern and post-structuralist perspectives.  The contributors discuss the physical, social, and semiotic qualities of medieval oralism:  how individual texts convey meaning, how various texts interrelate, how texts contribute to and are shaped by politics and ideologies in a context of oral production, and what this might have meant to their contemporary producers and audiences.

The book is divided into five parts.  “Oral Performance and Oral Text” confronts the dilemma facing scholars attempting to reconstruct oral performances from their written traces.  “Oral-Written Interfaces” focuses on specific productions and uses of oral-written hybrid texts.  “Staging the Poet’s Presence” concentrates on a vital nexus, the conjunction—or disjunction—of poet, performance, and text.  “The Thematics of Orality and Writing” explores how medieval poets regarded changes in technology, social relations, genre, and semiotics.  The last section, “Oral Principles in Manuscript Facts,” argues that the meanings of medieval texts are created from the dialogic relationship between orality and specific physical contexts.

The contributors are John Dagenais, John Miles Foley, Dolores Warwick Frese, Sylvia Huot, Robert Kellogg, Laurence de Looze, Tim William Machan, Stephen G. Nichols, Ward Parks, Ursula Schaefer, Dennis Tedlock, Hanna Vollrath, and Alois Wolf.  Vox intexta offers the best recent work on literacy, orality, and the transmission of culture in medieval texts.  International in scope, interdisciplinary in method, it will be welcomed by all medievalists.

About the Author

A.N. Doane is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  Carol Braun Pasternack is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.