Edouard Glissant
Towards a Literature of Orality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3694630 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michele Praeger (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 41 |
| Publication date | 1992-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Callaloo (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2931398 |
| OpenAlex | W2333625000 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 2 |
As is well known, Derrida, in 1960s, sought to give back to writing (ecriture), victimized by speech (parole), its rights. According to him, speech (logos) had confined writing to a secondary role and turned it into the supplement of a supplement, as it was, in Plato's words, further removed from proximity of voice and soul. Derrida sought to show that speech is at origin of occidental epistemologic and metaphysical system, from Plato to Rousseau, Hegel and LeviStrauss. Only writing could create a could become and therefore subvert, from inside, obsolete and universalizing dichotomies created by speech. Derrida, in a way, submitted speech to same kind of operation he denounced as being doing of European logocentrists, by taking away from speech its Sein, its difference, its opacity, as Edouard Glissant would have it, by turning speech into writing. The past twenty-five years have seen a valorization of writing, which, at least as far as French are concerned, had never really been threatened. Writing, under guise of text, was, during these years, canonized, and dissent was only tolerated much later because of weariness that accompanies periods of decadence. Roland Barthes had proclaimed of Philippe Sollers, death to subject; and writer had become a scriptor without a body or an identity. Nevertheless, Barthes, ultimate dissenter as he would transgress very rules he had set forth, reintroduced body within text of pleasure. This worshipping of writing had relegated orality to domain of folklore and regionalism. Orality became butt of a condescendent nostalgia and an object of studies for international as well as for domestic ethnographers. Edouard Glissant, Martinican poet and ethnographer, although very knowledgeable about occidental ideological currents (for him, Occident is not a physical but an ideological place), stays at edge of these currents, not because he despises them but because his genealogy and his geno-text, to use Kristeva's expression, are different from those of occidental thinkers
Art · Literacy · Literature · Orality · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · North African History and Literature · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Citations per year | 0.09 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1993 - 1998 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |