{"id":17,"date":"2015-01-14T16:00:30","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T23:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/?p=17"},"modified":"2015-01-14T16:00:30","modified_gmt":"2015-01-14T23:00:30","slug":"writing-out-loud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/2015\/01\/14\/writing-out-loud\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing out loud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Try reading your favorite passage in your favorite book out loud. Now try and tell me if what you just performed, belonged to an oral culture or written culture? You might find, like me, that often what we read or listen to does not belong to a single realm of oral or written, but rather coexisting Worlds of the oral and the written. Both Edward Chamberlain and Courtney MacNeil serve as interesting evidence\u00a0to contest a popular\u00a0understanding of our culture as either oral or<\/em> written. Macneil quotes Walter Ong in saying that currently, \u201corality exists either in isolation from literacy, or as subservient to it\u2026mutual interdependency between the two media is not a recognized possibility\u201d. In reality, I feel that even by typing this blog post, I\u2019m participating in both an oral and a written culture, speaking in my mind what I am inscribing onto this page. Chamberlain contributes to this argument in claiming it is a misconception that these two cultures exist separately, and that \u201call so-called oral cultures are rich in forms of writing, albeit non-syllabic and non-alphabetic ones<\/a>\u201d (Chamberlain 18). In other words, we cannot simply discount the existence of a written culture in a predominantly oral culture, since \u201cwritten\u201d can take multiple forms. Both MacNeil and Chamberlain see that orality and literacy come hand in hand, and not separately.<\/p>\n

I am drawn to the\u00a0performance aspect of language, whether everyday story telling or upon a theater stage. Being a theater lover, I connect with this aspect of a co-existing \u201cliterature\/oralature\u201d pairing that Rosenberg proposes in MacNeil\u2019s work. Especially in the world of performance, there is a close tie between the written text of a performance or story, with its oral expression. Chamberlain importantly claims that we are all involved in \u201cboth oral and written traditions\u2026our stories and songs draw on resources of both\u201d (Chamberlain 18). I am inclined to think of our\u00a0stories and songs as performances, both written in text or an alternative structure of scribing, as well as an oral interpretation with imaginative expression. There is a way in which our stories or performances can exist scientifically and categorically as letters on a page (written or literate culture), as well as in imaginative and magical forms performed or told (oral culture). This is the case especially when different people can interpret a single written story or text differently. In terms of story as performance, the existence of \u2018misinterpretation<\/a>\u2019 seems to suggest a written culture that is dependent on an oral interpretative culture, and not existing separately. When we tell a story to a friend, or when a story is passed from one generation orally down to another, speech and writing becomes hard to separate. MacNeil sums this up perfectly by claiming that \u201cspeech and writing are so entangled with each other in our various forms and performance of language\u201d.<\/p>\n

So what does all this mean to our current World of heightened technology and communication? In my opinion, the argument that oral and written cultures exist separately is becoming harder to prove as our World advances technologically. Walter Ong suggests a sense of oral cultures living in the present and the permanence of written culture. In fact, speaking in terms of our present society, text has lost a sense of durability and permanence, text messages being deleted instantaneously, and oral cultures can exist through time as recordings and sound-files (MacNeil). Today, we can ‘delete’ or ‘extend’ both oral and written aspects of our culture easily. I think this goes to show the blurring of both oral and written cultures in our present World, and how both of these modes of culture exist not only together, but\u00a0dependent on each other for existence and performance.<\/p>\n

What do you think?<\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chamberlain, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground<\/i>. Toronto: AA. Knopf. 2003. Print.<\/p>\n

MacNeil, Courtney. \u201cOrality.\u201d The Chicago School of Media Theory<\/i>. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. 14 Jan 2015.\u00a0http:\/\/lucian.uchicago.edu\/blogs\/mediatheory\/keywords\/orality\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Try reading your favorite passage in your favorite book out loud. Now try and tell me if what you just performed, belonged to an oral culture or written culture? You might find, like me, that often what we read or listen to does not belong to a single realm of oral or written, but rather […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28738,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28738"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/liujeffrey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}