Purpose: The purpose of this article is to present the stylistic and thematic analysis of Geez poetry, in a way that examines the profound and complex meaning that it carries.Research Methodology: The article methodology consisted of qualitative research methodology and a purposive sampling was used in field work. Secondary data was also obtained from books and scholarly journals and duly acknowledged. Idiomatic and literal translation methods were used, with special emphasis on meaning rather than form. The translation from Geez (...) to English was conducted by the researcher and content analysis was used to analyze the data.Findings: The poems revealed a rich, valuable aesthetics and dynamic changes taking place in the cultural mold of the Geez speaking society. It has also revealed that a huge amount of Geez oral poetry still remains unrecorded. It has also shown that Geez oral poetry is not being learned by the young generation and this could lead to a loss in cultural practices embodied in it.Unique Contribution to Theory, Policy and Practice: The article will contribute to the preservation, documentation and research endeavors being undertaken by researches, educators as well as policy makers involved in areas related to the study of the classical language of Geez. This is because none of Geez poetry has been composed, written or recorded in any parchments or books by the churches at all. Hence, it is only too obvious that a massive amount of poetic wisdom has been lost that future generations could have benefited from. (shrink)

One of the curious things about Homeric studies is the way in which, although opinions in this field fluctuate violently, from time to time certain among them tend to become crystallized for no particular reason and are then accepted as something approaching orthodoxy. It is to try to delay such a crystallization, if it is not already too late, that I direct this brief coup d'ail at some current opinions on whether Homer—for the sake of clarity I apply this name (...) in the first instance to the monumental composer of the Iliad—used the aid of writing, and in general at the value of comparative inferences based on the heroic poetry of modern Yugoslavia. (shrink)

One of the curious things about Homeric studies is the way in which, although opinions in this field fluctuate violently, from time to time certain among them tend to become crystallized for no particular reason and are then accepted as something approaching orthodoxy. It is to try to delay such a crystallization, if it is not already too late, that I direct this brief coup d'ail at some current opinions on whether Homer—for the sake of clarity I apply this name (...) in the first instance to the monumental composer of the Iliad—used the aid of writing, and in general at the value of comparative inferences based on the heroic poetry of modern Yugoslavia. (shrink)

The term Bāul is universally associated with singing. It is a form of folk music that emerges from Bengal in India. However, Bāul does not simply imply singing. It is more of a philosophy which is deeply rooted in the quest for self-realization. The raison d’être for the kind of attraction the music of Bāuls and the poetry of Kabir had for the West is that their music and poetry was essentially a poetry of simplicity, peace and (...) celestial love. Since Bāul music and Kabir’s poetry transcends religious boundaries, it was easily accepted by the Western canon that was looking to the East for newer inspiration and life philosophies. This paper focuses on the oral Indian tradition of Bāulgan and the Dohas of Kabir and how they influenced the writing of the legendary Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. The paper also partially focuses on Purna Das and Laxman Das, two famous Bāul singers who went to live in Woodstock at the house of Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s and their resulting friendship. (shrink)

Although scholars have examined the oral and gustatory terms used by medieval authors to describe speech and other verbal phenomena, the significant role of the chest in medieval accounts of verbal experience has been largely ignored. Medieval authors commonly describe speech as issuing from the chest, often without mentioning the mouth at all; and they associate the chest with not only individual speech acts but also the faculty of speech as well as the psychological functions relating to speech and (...) to language generally. Old English literature, among others, widely manifests this tendency to describe speech and other verbal functions in pectoral terms. Although Old English poetry sometimes mentions the mouth in connection with speech, many contexts instead specify the chest as the source of utterance and as the center of verbal activity, usually without any mention of the mouth. As a corrective to the tendency of “orality” and similar terms to deflect attention from the chest's significant verbal role, this essay uses the term “pectorality” to describe the chest's various verbal functions in Old English poetry and other literature. (shrink)

"What one cannot compute, one must poetize." So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems--Western and non-Western, low culture and high--Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience. Poetry grants (...) us the ability to move "beyond the limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein's point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. Poetry and Mind shows that poetry--a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans--arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global": it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil's readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This article considers how poetry features in Pasolini’s cinema. It argues that the manner in which Pasolini films poetry provides insight into his theory of an affinity between poetry and film, and into more general judgements concerning social reality. The article begins with an analysis of the final sequence of Salò (1975) where I argue that Ezra Pound’s poetry provides a soundtrack for the spectacle of torture in which the film’s libertines engage. Following this, I consider (...) Pasolini’s 1965 text “The Cinema of Poetry” and use this text as a way of reading the role played by a copy of Rimbaud’s collected poems in Teorema ( Theorem, 1968). I then move to consider the relationship between oral recitation and text in Il decameron ( The Decameron, 1971) and Il fiore della mille e una notte ( The Arabian Nights, 1974). In doing this, I argue that one can observe a shift across these films whereby poetry and orality move from being a foundational moment for reciprocal community to being a vehicle for an ambiguous and violent fate. The article then considers the conspicuous presence of reading and writing within Salò before ending with a consideration of one scene towards the end of the film in which Pasolini appears to invest a recitation of the Gospel with a disruptive force that is otherwise lacking in his final film. (shrink)

The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that theIliadand theOdysseyare very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of theOdysseysat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even in the way that (...) our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse. (shrink)

The modern editorial practice of printing Old English poetry one verse to a line with a distinct separation between half-lines distracts attention from a well-known and important fact, that Old English poetry is copied without exception in long lines across the writing space. Normal scribal practice does not distinguish verses, reserving capitals and points for major divisions of a work. In manuscripts of Latin poetry, however, quite another practice holds. Latin verses copied in England after the eighth (...) century are regularly transmitted in a format familiar to modern readers: verses are set out one to a line of writing, capitals begin each line, and often some sort of pointing marks the end of each verse. The regularity of this distinction in copying practice and the difference in the nature and level of the graphic conventions used for verse in the two languages imply that such scribal practice was deliberate and was useful and significant for contemporary readers. (shrink)

The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by (...) verse, even in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse. (shrink)

In a recent article Margalit Finkelberg raises the question of whether or not the phrase κλοσ π;θιτον at Iliad 9.413 is indeed a Homeric formula: λετο μν μοι νóατοσ, τρ κλοσ π;θιτον σται Her purpose is to ‘test the antiquity of κλοσ π;θιτον on the internal grounds of Homeric diction’ .1 Proposing to use specifically the analytic techniques of oral theory, she argues that this phrase does not represent a survival from an Indo-European heroic poetry, as has been (...) suggested from the occurrence of its exact cognate, śápos;rdvas áksitam, in Vedic poetry. To this end Finkelberg presents a precise and carefully organized argument. I briefly summarize its two branches as follows: It is the formulae that comprise the oldest stratum of Homeric diction, and so it is here that one would find survivals of Indo-European poetic diction. κλοσ π;θιτον σται , however, cannot be judged a Homeric formula by the criterion of repetition since it is a unique phrase in Homer. Nor can it be judged a formula by the ‘functional’ criterion since the better attested κλοσ οὒ ποτ óλεται expresses the same essential idea in the same metrical shape. A unique phrase such as that in question might nonetheless be ancient. The development of the use of π;θιτοσ, first to modify concrete nouns, and only later with abstracts, however, would indicate that its use with κλοσ is late. The demonstration that κλοσ θιτον σται is a ‘formulaic expression’, moreover, argues that it was coined for this specific context in Iliad 9 by analogy with other Homeric formulae, and so does not preserve an Indo-European formula. (shrink)

Performance is increasingly important to the poet, which is evidenced by the growing numbers of videos and audio recordings online including YouTube, the National Poetry library, and Poetry Archive. As a result, there are greater opportunities to engage with poets reading their own work and consequently, there is a need to move away from thinking of poetry as primary something that takes shape on the page. Furthermore, by refocusing attention to poetry as an oral artform, (...) in particular to poetry performance, different ways of understanding the value of poetry come to the fore. The live poetry performance, I argue, offers an attempt to reclaim the personal individual expression of language in contemporary society and demands attention by the audience because of the role of voice and body in the performance. Through awareness of ‘uniqueness of voice,’ the performed poem becomes a site of collective meaning making with individual identity intact as a shared endeavour between performer and audience, and necessarily resists appropriation (in the sense that the words experienced cannot be divorced from the performer or the performance space to serve as a proxy for meaning elsewhere). This chapter therefore makes an argument for the need to engage with spoken word and performance poetry in the live performance space. (shrink)

In this study of Baraka's transformation of white avant-grade poetics into a unique black poetics, Harris argues that Baraka's work can be best understood in the context of a jazz aesthetic. Baraka, he says, has taken white avant-garde and postmodernist poetic modes and political ideas, and through a formal and social process of transformation typical of jazz revision, transformed them into a black poetics and metaphysics. Harris describes the failure of the postmodernists to provide suitable aesthetic and social solutions for (...) ethnic and political problems. Baraka set as his models jazzmen like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, who attempted to destroy white music so that a new black music could be born. To "jazzify" his poetry, he adapted a "fast rap" of scatting, "songification" and other oral and performance techniques. Harris concludes a discussion of Baraka's influence on black literature. ISBN 0-8262-0483-X: $20.00. (shrink)

The marginality of poetry in American culture has been taken for granted at least since the dawn of the modernist period, when Walt Whitman printed his first volume of poetry at his own expense. More recently, it has become an article of faith that there is a real popular audience for poetry, but somewhere else-in the East. Literary journals, the popular press, and publishers have made household names of a handful of Eastern European writers: Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph (...) Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert. One is regaled with chestnuts about ordinary people in the Eastern bloc who care about "the Word," manuscripts passed from hand to hand, even poems preserved orally. Inevitably, the questions are revived: Where are the great American poets? Has American poetry been reduced to private confessions and personal trivia? Why is it that our poetry lacks that public, political relevance? The answer to such questions is often that we do not have the weight of History on our backs, the state oppression under which, as Milosz says, "poetry is no longer alienated," no longer "a foreigner in society," and can become more important than bread.1 But what has not surfaced in the vaunted "poetry and politics" debate is the extent to which our homage to victims of censorship everywhere has become a fetishization of totalitarianism, and a self-serving one at that. The mythology of our freedom, unbounded and unmediated, depends precisely on this other world, on what happens over there. 1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry , p. 95; hereafter abbreviated WP. Bruce F. Murphy's work has appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and An Gael. He has completed a manuscript of poems and with Friedrich Ulfers is writing a study of Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

The book explores three specific areas: the practice of writing with respect to orality; the interpretive modes of poetic and philosophical discourse as self ...

Homer is universally praised for the clarity of his style. Yet even to sympathetic or perceptive readers, if their critical remarks really express their judgments, his poetical intention has been singularly opaque: invited to leave town by Plato, as if he were a bad ethical philosopher; lauded by Aristotle for his dramatic unity, as if he were a pupil of Sophocles; criticised by Longinus for composing an Odyssey without Iliadic sublimity; abused in more recent times by Scaliger as indecorous, irrational, (...) improper and undisciplined, as if he were seeking to portray the perfect exemplar of a renaissance prince; defended by Dacier as a sublime primitive, innocent of taste and art, who achieved perfection ‘par la seule force de son genie’. Some of these judgments are no more than the stock responses of their age to epic poetry. The critic regards the poems from his own point of view; he discovers what he expects to find; and he passes a judgment that illuminates the workings of his own mind but sheds nothing but darkness upon Homer's. The announcement, therefore, of a new criticism by Notopoulos and Lord, a criticism based on the results of comparative study and free from the old prejudices of Analysts and Unitarians, is an event of importance. It may even be the case that the despised anachronistic ‘singer’, that unwashed, mendicant figure lurking in the coffee houses of the Balkans, has something to say. But whatever he says, it will be applicable to Homer only by analogy, and will require verification. (shrink)

Paul usually ends his letters with salutations to believers who meet in someone else’s house. Far from being individualistic, these greetings also include people from different house churches. Considered from a functional angle, these greetings cement relationships between house churches. Within an ubuntu worldview, the oral praxis of sereto (Sepedi) or isiduko (IsiXhosa) (praise-poetry) establishes and confirms relationships between members of the same community (family, clan or tribe). The question is how such praxes affect women who belong to (...) such communities. Contribution: This article is a comparative analysis of how some of the salutations used at the end of some of Paul’s epistles touch on gender relations in the same way as the ubuntu oral praxis of sereto or isiduko touches on gender relations among members of a community (family, clan or tribe). (shrink)

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by (...) its citizens. But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

A striking fact of our current literary culture is the estrangement between poets and critics and reviewers of contemporary poetry on the one hand, and proponents of that loosely defined set of doctrines, methodologies, and interests that goes by the name of “theory” on the other. There are individual exceptions to this on both sides, and one can find counterexamples to every generalization I shall suggest here. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the climates of opinion to be found in English (...) and philosophy departments, poetry workshops and critical symposia, creative writing and cultural studies programs, and the ­ nonacademic counterparts of these—especially among people in their twenties and thirties—has to acknowledge the lack of acquaintance and interest—and often even the disdain and contempt—that characterizes the relations between poets and those engaged in the kind of high-level, quasi-philosophical reflective activity that literature, and poetry in particular, used to occasion. Illustrations are easy to come by. References to modern poetry by younger theorists are typically confined to the high modernists and to poets canonized twenty or thirty years ago in books like Donald Allen’s New American Poetry or Richard Howard’s Alone with American; and their rare allusions to the poetry of their contemporaries often betray a striking lack of familiarity and taste. Conversely, the fact that eighty years after Ezra Pound called for the breaking of everything breakable, a poet as intelligent and conceptually ambitious as Jorie Graham should title a book The End of Beauty, and have the theoretical outlook evoked by the title hailed as radical by as informed a critic as Helen Vendler, surely suggests that the level of reflective awareness in the poetry community is not what it might be.2 1. Quoted in Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered—An Oral Biography , p. 43.2. See Helen Vendler, “Married to Hurry and Grim Song,” The New Yorker, 27 July 1987, pp. 74-77. John Koethe is professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His most recent book of poetry is The Late Wisconsin Spring. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study observes oral poetry as an aesthetic manifestation and attention, especially to poems that recall childhood in which the inspiration is the oral collection. Coordinates favor following the poetic and creative properties of the aforementioned poetic genre, from which verses from the book Batata cozida, mingau de cará [Cooked Potato, Yam Porridge], written by Eloí Bocheco (2006), are analyzed. Thus, it can be said that the poetics for childhood understood by the writer’s proposal allows the (...) little reader to transit, in the same creation, through the known, that is, throughout the elements of oral poetry almost always recovered from the popular tradition; and for what he knows at the same opportunity: the poem of declared authorship, which presupposes a work woven basically in writing. In addition, such verses can be understood as a variation of the oral tradition, renewed on the threshold between orality and writing, in a playful game with both codes. (shrink)

En este artículo describiremos la vitalidad del sistema fonológico del mapudungun hablado por escolares pewenches de la Provincia del Biobío, VIII Región. Específicamente, nos hemos propuesto: a) Determinar los fonos/fonemas, y su fonotaxis, que se relevan como indicadores de vitalidad, b) Identificar las transferencias fonético-fonológicas presentes en la fonología del pewenche hablado por estos escolares y c) Interpretar las transferencias encontradas en términos del grado de vitalidad de la fonología de la lengua. La muestra está conformada por un grupo de (...) 20 escolares bilingües de entre 12 y 15 años de edad, que se encuentran cursando 7° y 8° año básico en escuelas rurales pertenecientes a dos comunidades pewenches del valle del Queuco, en la comuna de Alto Biobío. Para la recolección del material fonológico, se aplicó a los participantes una lista léxica de 65 ítems, material que se complementó con la narración oral en mapudungun de un cuento. Según nuestros datos, hemos podido constatar la existencia de una serie de rasgos fónicos en el mapudungun hablado por los escolares pewenches que obedece a la influencia de las estructuras fonológicas del castellano. Sin embargo, el grado y la difusión de los fenómenos de transferencia se desarrollan de manera heterogénea en ambas comunidades en estudio, debido, entre otros factores, a la intensidad del contacto. In this article we will describe the vitality of the phonological system Mapudungun spoken by Pewenche schoolchildren from the Biobío province, VIII Region. We intend: a) To determine the phones/phonemes, and their phonotactics, which are revealed as vitality markers. b) To identify the phonetic-phonological transferences which are present in the Pewenche spoken by these schoolchildren, and, c) To interpret the transferences found in terms of the degree of the language phonological vitality. The sample is composed of 20 bilingual schoolchildren from 12 to 15 years old, who are in 7th and 8th grade in rural primary schools belonging to two Pehuenche comunities from Valle del Queuco, in the city of Alto Biobío. To collect the phonological material, we applied a 64-item lexical list, which was complemented with the oral narration of a tale in Mapudungun. According to our data, we have been able to verify the existence of a series of phonic features in the Mapudungun spoken by Pewenche schoolchildren, which originate because of the influence of the Spanish phonological structure. However, the degree and spread of the transference phenomena develop in a heterogeneous way in both of the studied communities. due to the contact intensity, among other possible factors. (shrink)

In this research I aim to contribute to a better understanding of transitionality in poetic language by applying for the first time the hypotheses recently developed by pioneers in the emerging field of cognitive poetics to a living tradition. The benefits of working with a living tradition are tremendous: it is easy to establish the literacy level of the authors and the mode of recording of poetic text is also easy to elicit or, when necessary, to control. I chose a (...) living poetic tradition originating from the Jbala (Morocco). Although it is not epic and local poets create only relatively short poetic texts, memorisation is also used; it has been demonstrated that oral improvisation and the use of memory are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that research on the living Jebli tradition holds promise for our understanding of oral poetry, and for revisiting the intriguing question of formulaic language. (shrink)

The main purpose of this work is to provide a semiotic ontology for redescription of active cognitive externalism, recently developed by the paradigm 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended cognition). In our approach, distributed cognitive systems (DCSs) are described as semiosis, signs in action. We explored the relationship between semiosis and cognition, as conceived by C. S. Peirce, in association with the notion of distributed cognitive system (DCS). We introduce Peircean externalist approach with an emphasis on the notion of temporal distribution (...) of semiosis, and describe DCSs, and their elements, as “sign in action”. To develop this argument, we describe an example of DCS -- verbal-musical improvisation of repente, repentismo, or viola singing. It is a phenomenon of verbal-musical improvisation that takes the form of a challenge in versified oral poetry. We describe the phenomenon as the embodiment of the formal structure of a cognitive task and an inferential process. This embodiment corresponds to a semiotization of the repente performances as DCSs. The temporally distributed tendency of repentismo organizes the DCS as a system that performs metasemiotic experiments on the action of signs. (shrink)

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero’s analysis of the Muse of Greek oral poetry to rethink the relationship between mimesis and narration, and the shaping power of the act of narration on the subject. I suggest that Cavarero’s reading of the Muse provides an understanding of mimesis that moves beyond representation to a form of contagion between embodied and temporal subjectivities. To clarify this, I show how Cavarero’s Muse anticipates her critique of rectitude in Inclinations and makes it (...) clear that the inclined subject is not only the vulnerable and open subject as opposed to the vertical and autonomous one, but also the subject that has the power to incline the narratives that mimetically straighten it. The aim is to understand mimetic inclinations as destabilising voices of vertical narrations. As a concrete example of the troubling power of mimetic inclinations, I propose a rereading of Cavarero’s technique of theft presented in In Spite of Plato as a strategy of mimetic resistance. (shrink)

Catalogues and ringcompositions are common motifs in early Greek epic poetry. In certain cases catalogues are enclosed by ringcompositions or ring-like structures. While the catalogues in “Iliad” and “Odyssey” have been well examined, the different catalogues found in Hesiod’s poems have received less attention. This article provides an analysis of the use of ringcompositions in several catalogues in the “Theogony”. It shows that structure and function of ringcomposition depend on the character of the catalogue: the less digressive and extensive (...) the catalogue, the more complex and elaborate the circle. It is further argued that this interdependence between catalogues and ringcompositions is related to the performance of oral poetry. (shrink)

This paper progresses the original argument of Richard Ratzan that formal presentation of the medical case history follows a Homeric oral-formulaic tradition. The everyday work routines of doctors involve a ritual poetics, where the language of recounting the patient's ‘history’ offers an explicitly aesthetic enactment or performance that can be appreciated and given meaning within the historical tradition of Homeric oral poetry and the modernist aesthetic of Minimalism. This ritual poetics shows a reliance on traditional word usages (...) that crucially act as tools for memorisation and performance and can be linked to forms of clinical reasoning; both contain a tension between the oral and the written record, questioning the priority of the latter; and the performance of both helps to create the Janus-faced identity of the doctor as a ‘performance artist’ or ‘medical bard’ in identifying with medical culture and maintaining a positive difference from the patient as audience, offering a valid form of patient-centredness. (shrink)

In this essay I take up Plato’s critique of poetry, which has little to do with epistemology and representational imitation, but rather the powerful effects that poeticperformances can have on audiences, enthralling them with vivid image-worlds and blocking the powers of critical reflection. By focusing on the perceived psychological dangers of poetry in performance and reception, I want to suggest that Plato’s critique was caught up in the larger story of momentous shifts in the Greek world, turning on (...) the rise of literacy and its far-reaching effects in modifying the original and persisting oral character of Greek culture. The story of Plato’s Republic in certain ways suggests something essential for comprehending the development of philosophy in Greece (and in any culture, I would add): that philosophy, as we understand it, would not have been possible apart from the skills and mental transformations stemming from education in reading and writing; and that primary features of oral language and practice were a significant barrier to the development of philosophical rationality (and also a worthy competitor for cultural status and authority). Accordingly, I go on to argue that the critique of writing in the Phaedrus is neither a defense or orality per se, nor a dismissal of writing, but rather a defense of a literate soul over against orality and the indiscriminate exposure of written texts to unworthy readers. (shrink)

This article discusses the Mekrijärvi boreal lake system in North Karelia, Finland, and the Koitajoki river. It traces historico-cultural interactions with the lake, from its role as an epicenter of Karelian rune singing and traditional practices, to the natural and cultural disruptions caused by large-scale natural resource extraction that shattered forests, peatlands, and waterbodies, and on into a new era of restoration. In the 2000s a community-driven NGO began to document oral histories and scientific evidence of the lake’s condition. (...) In the 2020s, this effort evolved into a landscape-scale eco-cultural revitalization effort. Habitat for endangered whitefish and degraded peatlands are being restored and traditional knowledge has become a central force in rebuilding and re-imagining traditional northern societies. Snippets of personal memories and oral poetry offer a window into a unique boreal world which, though once thought to be lost, is in a state of re-discovery and healing. (shrink)

El origen y significado de la “inspiración poética” ha sido siempre objeto de considerable controversia. Lo que los críticos no preguntan muy a menudo es: ¿cuáles son las palabras o frases que los textos poéticos tempranos, previos al Período Clásico, usaron para expresar el genio poético o mousikē que nosotros asociamos con la inspiración en la poesía griega temprana? En este ensayo examino, en primer lugar y principalmente, tanto la terminología empleada por Homero y Hesíodo para expresar la experiencia poética, (...) como el rol del aoidoso cantor/poeta en sus descripciones respectivas. Sostengo no solo que se confunden en Homero y Hesíodo las nociones físicas y figurativas de “inspiración”, es decir, que no son diferenciadas por los poetas de manera consciente, sino que la poesía misma debe haber sido vista por Homero y Hesíodo como un don divino –de acuerdo a la voluntad de los dioses–. También sostengo que diversas etimologías y contextos sugieren fuertemente que un tipo de mania o posesión extática fue una parte importante del proceso poético temprano. El trabajo aquí presentado es una versión abreviada de un proyecto de investigación más amplio que busca examinar el origen y desarrollo de las actitudes pre-platónicas, platónicas y post-platónicas hacia la inspiración y la alegoría. --- “Some Reflections on the Early Greek Notion of Poetic Inspiration”. The origin and meaning of “poetic inspiration” has always been the subject of considerable controversy. What critics rarely ask are: what words or phrases did the early poetic texts use to express the poetic genius or mousikē we associate with inspiration in the early Greek poetry, and thus prior to the Classical period? In this paper, I examine first and foremost both the terminology employed by Homer and Hesiod to express the poetic experience and the role of the aoidos or singer/poet in their respective accounts. I argue that not only are the physical and figurative notions of “inspiration” in Homer and Hesiod confused, that is, they are not consciously distinguished for the poets, but poetry itself for Homer and Hesiod must have been seen as a divine gift –as willed by the gods. I also argue that a number of etymologies and contexts strongly suggest that a type of mania or ecstatic possession was very much a part of the early poetic process. The work presented here is an abridged part of a larger research project that seeks to examine the origin and development of pre-Platonic, Platonic and postPlatonic attitudes toward inspiration and allegory. (shrink)

Abstract:Epode 16, Horace's famous decline poem about Rome before Actium, has long been viewed as a cynical response to Vergil's prophecy of a returning Golden Age in Eclogue 4. In this article, I argue that there is another, unrecognized intertext for Epode 16—Pindar's Olympian 2—to which Horace's bleak poem alludes in a "window reference" refracted through Vergil's bucolic. As such, Horace's cynicism represents, in fact, a lament over the lost simplicity and timelessness of Greek oral poetry, and an (...) attempt to reclaim for his listeners/readers the originary experience of listening. In so doing, Horace takes up the Pindaric mantle of poet-prophet. (shrink)

The fact that the Odyssey and the Theogony share a number of verses in common seemed to most scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reason enough to assume that one work has influenced the other. Now that more is known about the techniques of oral poetry, which have clearly influenced the composition of both works, a greater caution is rightly shown in arguing for the priority of the one or the other on the basis of individual (...) verses or phrases, since these may in fact be formulaic and thus common property which could have been used by any poet working in that tradition. In one case, however, Odyssey 8. 166–77 and Theogony 79–93, what is common is not a single verse but two and a half lines, so that the possibility of chance occurrence of the same formulas is virtually ruled out. Quite rightly therefore few critics have doubted that here either Homer has directly influenced Hesiod or vice versa. For this reason a good deal of the argumentation for the priority of the Odyssey or of the Theogony has concentrated on an examination of Od. 8. 166–77 and Th. 79–93. However, as is usual in such cases, most of the arguments which have been adduced in favour of the priority of the one or of the other are reversible because they are based on subjective grounds such as alleged incompetent adaptation of the earlier work, which is tacitly assumed to be superior. Since these arguments have recently been discussed in detail by Heinz Neitzel in a useful survey, it will not be necessary to review them here. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAnalyzing the function of song as a genre can clarify debates over how Shelley’s more visionary mode of poetry might intervene in politics and whether his overtly political popular songs betray the philosophical claim to a revolution in subjectivity made by those visionary works. Because the genre of song originates in communal, oral performance, yet is also a subgenre of the larger category of lyric, its intrinsic oppositions or tensions mediate between political action and lyric subjectivity. Tracing two (...) streams of song, the “urbane” and the “marginal,” that offer models for Shelley’s experiments in song, the essay then conducts a census of songs in the volumes that Shelley published or intended to publish. Applying a description of oral song performances as representing a “bodily economy,” it examines Shelley’s three revisionary Greek dramas, especially the two published in 1820, to interpret the drafts of songs intended for his “little volume of popular songs, wholly political.”. (shrink)

Evidence of the intimate linkage of the shaman's song and divinatory procedures may be viewed in the ancient epics. These narrative poems contain structural and thematic elements recognizable from the shaman's song—in particular his or her voyage to the Otherworld and the guidance of oracular powers. In this paper, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Euripedes' Ion, and The Ozidi Saga (a living epic from West Africa) are examined as recuperations of the orally composed and transmitted song of the shaman. I argue (...) that the epics—the origins of which predate their composition in literary form—bear witness to these most ancient and mysterious forms of linguistic expression. As depictions of Otherwordly journeys, they can be viewed through a metaphysic outside of time, rendering divination not only possible but inevitable, and necessitating a language of abstraction, allusion, and ambiguity. Today's experimental poetries may not all partake of a conscious recuperation of shamanic themes and forms, but they share an imaginary (yet not imagined) repositioning of reality, an open questioning of consensus forms of awareness, and an aesthetic shaping of what Jean Gebser calls “Integral Consciousness” (15), the simultaneous integration-disintegration of archaic, mythic, magic, and mental paradigms in an intensification of awareness which sees time as diaphanous, and Mind as a doorway between possibilities. (shrink)

Constatant que nos étudiants italiens de FLE ont contracté, au cours des années, de mauvaises habitudes de prononciation, souvent dues à un enseignement lacunaire de la connaissance correcte des sons, et que le temps d’enseignement universitaire est réduit d’année en année, notre propos est de chercher à récupérer le temps perdu en insistant, au début de l’année d’un cours de Langue et Traduction française, sur l’oralité. Partant du poème et du jeu sur les signifiants et jonglant avec les signifiés, nous (...) essayerons de motiver les étudiants, peu enclins à la lecture de la poésie et qui, en outre, négligent de se mettre quotidiennement devant un miroir durant quatre ou sept minutes, temps prescrit par les méthodes phonétiques et phonologiques, et nécessaire pour acquérir de nouvelles habitudes phonatoires. Une partie de cet article sera dédiée aux poètes pour montrer comment la force orale du poème peut devenir un atout majeur pour une bonne prononciation ; une autre, à partir d’un vers, sera une sorte de « cahier de création » phonique, sémantique voire poétique. (shrink)