Oral Performance And Its Context

This volume is concerned with aspects of orality and literacy in the ancient world. It arises from the tremendous contemporary interest among scholars in questions of how literacy and orality co-exist and interact in the ancient world. The contents of the book are refereed papers originally presented at the fifth biennial 'Orality and Literacy in ancient Greece' held at The University of Melbourne in 2002. Papers are offered by scholars from Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia which deal with a range of periods and genres in antiquity, from Homer through to Roman literature. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the ancient world.

It is common opinion in biblical scholarship that the biblical documents functioned in a sociocultural context dominated by the spoken word. Detextification is the result of addressing the complex relation between this formally acknowledged functioning in its original oral delivery and the daily praxis of biblical scholarship in which these documents function as autonomous texts in an ever-expanding universe of texts. The argument in this book is that in addition to acknowledging the difference in media (oral performance there and then versus reading text here and now), it is crucial to differentiate and explicate the mindsets behind these media. A literate reader in the present structures thought, vis-à-vis text, differently from someone intensively formed by oral-aural communication, in the moment of exposure to a performing orator. The latter perspective was Paul’s in the process of his letter composition. Therefore, this is a leading question in detextification: How can a contemporary biblical scholar relate to the text of Paul’s letters in such a way as to understand how the apostle envisioned his original addressees structuring their thoughts during the event of a letter’s oral-aural delivery? Two test cases are provided from the Letter to the Galatians (Gal 2–3).

This book focuses on the performance of oral epics and explores the significance of performance features for the interpretation of epic poetry. The leading question of the book is how the socio-cultural context of performance and the various performance elements contribute to the meaning of oral epics. This is a question which not only concerns epics collected from living oral tradition, but which is also of importance for the understanding of the epics of antiquity and the Middle Ages which originated and flourished in an oral milieu. The book is based on fieldwork in the still vibrant oral traditions of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Siberia. The discussion combines fieldwork with theory; it is not limited to Turkic epics but branches out into other oral traditions.

The present collection examines the complex interrelationship between the oral and the written and the problems of textualisation.

This collection of essays pursues two new approaches to Q, the speeches of Jesus paralleled in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The essays in Part One suggest that recent work in ethnopoetics, the ethnography of performance, and theory of verbal art (especially that of John Miles Foley) both complements and challenges standard approaches to the teaching of Jesus. They explore how Q speeches might be appreciated as oral performance that resonates with listeners in a community context by referencing Israelite popular tradition. The essays in Part Two examine how the work of anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott on popular tradition, "the moral economy of the peasant," and "hidden transcripts" may illuminate the social context and political implications of Q speeches. --From publisher's description.

In April 2008 a conference was convened at Rice University that brought together experts in the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The papers discussed at the conference are presented here, revised and updated. The thirteen contributions comprise the keynote address by John Miles Foley; three essays on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible; three on the New Testament; three on the Qur'an; and two summarizing pieces, by the Africanist Ruth Finnegan and the Islamicist William Graham respectively. The central thesis of the book states that sacred Scripture was experienced by the three faiths less as a text contained between two covers and a literary genre, and far more as an oral phenomenon. In developing the performative, recitative aspects of the three religions, the authors directly or by implication challenge their distinctly textual identities. Instead of viewing the three faiths as quintessential religions of the book, these writers argue that the religions have been and continue to be appropriated not only as written but also very much as oral authorities, with the two media interpenetrating and mutually influencing each other in myriad ways.

In Sirach and Its Contexts an international cohort of experts analyze this second-century BCE Jewish text in its various literary, historical, philosophical, textual, and political contexts. Humanistic in approach, these essays elicit an ancient tradition’s teachings about human wisdom and flourishing.

This book proposes a set of criteria for determining the extent to which oral tradition influences written Persian epics. The criteria are applied to Persian epics, the Shah-name (c. 1000) and the Garshasp-name (c. 1064-66).