P aula M c D owell . The Invention of the Oral

Modern conceptions of “oral culture” are largely a product of a mid-twentieth-century interdisciplinary moment. In that period of media transformation, classicists such as Milman Parry, anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jack Goody, literary critics such as Walter J. Ong, and media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan all seized on the idea of the preliterate or nonliterate condition of humankind as a heuristic through which to understand the development of human consciousness. As Paula McDowell puts it in The Invention of the Oral, “today, ‘oral’ is a load-bearing concept that allows us to yoke together such complex ideas as oral discourse, oral communication, oral tradition, oral culture, and orality” (10). It has become a flashpoint humanities concept, contested and explored in the projects of historians of all periods. Yet, as her absorbing and well-argued new book points out, this postwar preoccupation with the oral in fact mirrored many characteristics of a key debate that gripped British culture two centuries earlier. The dramatic proliferation of print and the apparent specter of mass literacy during the eighteenth century forged generations of commentators who were just as acutely aware of media shift as their twentieth-century successors. Some heralded the new “print culture,” while to others an anxious discomfort with new models of circulation acted as a synergy for new ways of thinking about their relationship to the spoken word. In short, they too invented a notion of “oral culture,” one that served multiple contradictory cultural ends in the writing and thought of the period.

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literacy · Literature · Media studies · Oral tradition · Orality · PARRY · Print culture · Reading (process) · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies