Quotes About Orality

Quando leggiamo versi davvero straordinari, davvero buoni, tendiamo a farlo ad alta voce. Un buon verso non si lascia leggere a bassa voce o in silenzio. Se ci riusciamo, non è un verso efficace: il verso esige di essere declamato. Il verso non dimentica di essere stato un'arte orale prima di essere un'arte scritta, non dimentica di essere stato un canto.

For Leopardi the ancients and orality, uniquely endowed with the capacity to keep memory alive, were in fact one and the same thing (Z 4270 and note 2

The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing engages social, economic, political, religious and other structures. These, however, are only indirect concerns of the present book, which treats rather the differences in 'mentality' between oral and writing cultures.

Learning to read and write disables the oral poet, Lord found: it introduces into his mind the concept of a text as controlling the narrative and thereby interferes with the oral composing processes, which have nothing to do with texts but are 'the remembrance of songs sung

I am not against songs in films. We come from an oral tradition of storytelling. I have grown up listening to epics in oral rendition and oral rendition always had music.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.