Monday February 8th

Last week was an enjoyable week of reading through your blogs and following links, thank you all for a most enlightening week. This week I will be occupied with other courses, in the meantime I have pasted some of the many wonderful insights and passages and links from last week’s readings.  You can follow the links to find the blogs.

Last year, I read Dylan Robinson’s recent book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (here is an informative interview with Robinson about his book). In discussing perceptual attitudes within the context of colonization, Robinson also thematizes a certain turning aside. To him, “hungry listening” is a paradigmatic settler/colonial positionality, a programme of consumptive, appropriative, assimilating perception (50). His argument spoke powerfully to my background as a music student and to my history as a lifelong non-Indigenous inhabitant of Indigenous lands. What, Robinson asks, are the ethical and political implications of the very ways we listen, see, read, and create, access and circulate knowledge? What relationships do our perceptions form with the land and its co-inhabitants?

Often a story is composed of many words. Sometimes a single word contains a multitude of stories. Looking back on the “Words of Welcome” with which I launched this blog, I can see that “welcome” is itself a word of many stories: narratives of travel, customs of hospitality, stories of home. A speech act theorist might say it has a definite illocutionary force, calling into being a network of material and affective relationships. Or you might say that “welcome” is a word of magic, one that alters the world.

hIn If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, J. Edward Chamberlin reflects on the intersections and contradictions between word and world. This relationship, like that between reality and the imagination (and any number of binary pairs), is not one of antagonistic exclusion. On the contrary, Chamberlin’s “world of words” brings us closer to “the world we live in,” providing imaginative structures with which to articulate our relationships and experiences with and within that world (1). Although considered to a certain degree arbitrary, words are no less real, no less “true” than our everyday material reality. Indeed, Chamberlin would suggest, that very reality is the creative product of discourse, of stories.

Recently, cognitive linguistics has allowed us to picture how language does not simply serve as a vehicle of communication but fundamentally underlies our most intimate experiences of thought and feeling. Metaphor—that tricky “hinge” of language’s strangeness (Chamberlin 162)—may be no mere poetic device but a crucial conceptual tool, one that allows us to imagine the immaterial but nonetheless real (love, value, sovereignty, progress, anger, understanding) in terms of the concrete and embodied (heat, movement, light, objects). (Here is a lecture from our very own UBC on the fascinating research being done in conceptual metaphor theory and embodiment.) What came first, the thought or the metaphor? The world or the story?”

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 Additionally, hypertext is moving the entirety of the written world towards a potential singularity, as linked text leads to linked text until all works are connected. This is similar to what Project Ocean was trying to accomplish. Thus, hypertext plays a role in reconfiguring the relationship between reader and author, as well as relationships between different texts.

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 In his (problematic) seminal work, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong points out that “sound exists only when it is going out of existence” (Ong 70) and is thus inferior to the permanency of the written word. He also states that “when a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity,” while “writing and print isolate” (73). Story-time YouTube videos do not conform to either of these facts. The video format makes sound permanent and fixed, but the oral story-teller is separated from their audience – they are speaking to a camera, and each individual audience member watches alone, breaking up the ‘unity’ of the audience. Thus, traditional boundaries between oral and literate cultures are obfuscated, meaning this hierarchy is no longer applicable. As our technologies advance even further, I would suggest that these distinctions will become even murkier.

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Here are a couple of great links:

Long time ago by Leslie Marmon Silko

Making Connections – The Power of Oral Storytelling | Trent Hohaia | TEDxUOA

And finally, I highly recommend you read Leo’s story about how Evil Came into the World:

“I wanted to write a story where words left physical changes in the world, symbolizing the effects of storytelling on perception and truth, and literalize the common saying of how stories “shape” the world. This is Chamberlin’s musings on the “bear and the word ‘bear’” (132), of tracking and the significance of words. Through the bard “reshaping” old words, I wished to touch on issues of adaptation and narrative recontextualization; one need only examine the plethora of adaptations of Little Red Riding Hood, ranging from the childish to the most adult in Charles Perrault as adapted by Andrew Lang, to understand how we adapt and readapt the same stories time and again. In fact, LRRH has been so widely adapted in fact that its dark origins are news-worthy and treated as “unknown”.

Have a great week!