Courtney MacNeil’s “orality” gave some light to a dim idea that’s been floating around my cranium: the difference between the spoken and the written in developing meaning. Personally attracted to the written (likely attributed to Occidental academia prescription), I’ve seemed to search for a power of one over the other, of the written over the spoken. This is where a lot of my conception of misunderstanding between “oral culture” and “written culture,” and I believe the setting of Chamberlin and MacNeil’s explorations rests. However, I’ll give myself some credit as I was specifically interested in everyday speech and how the space and time of physically speaking may simplify or at the least compress communication, yet still achieve comparable meaning to writing. My power struggle wasn’t so cultural.

MacNeil’s exposition exceeds my scope as orality quickly becomes an intrinsic part of modern communication no less substantial than the written word. MacNeil prudently notes the practical uses of orality being “knowledge-exchange and transmission within a community,” confirming my suspicions of orality’s efficacy in communication. The somewhat obvious wording resonated with Erika Paterson’s notions of the listener and the storyteller being “connected to a time and a place” fostering environments where “stories absorb their moment of telling, the space they are told, and the listener’s response.” Connection creates memorability, and memorability creates lasting knowledge or information. Beyond speaking aloud is connecting (an audible groan at the cliche connecting) with an audience, with a community to create collective memory triggers.

Orality then can shed the Western “valuable-ness” comparison to written communication with works such as Chamberlin’s and MacNeil’s as they prove, despite their own medium, that orality is inescapable. MacNeil points to Western Spoken Word poets and recorded sound bites as simple examples of the Toronto School’s definition being problematic. The binary of oral culture and written culture disintegrates quite quickly, especially with new media technologies. Deeper analysis of such technologies’ effects is likely available but my superficial suspicion is that this disintegration occurs in the dialogue that happens between the two Western conceptions of culture on blogs, television, radio; dialogue that shifts between written, visual, and oral communication at ease and at a rapid pace.

A possible connection to the oral culture vs. written culture debate might be found in the development of a high modernist canon in poetry. The new critics, and the generally anthologized modern poets, all pointed towards the poem as a work of art immune to time, place, and society. The lofty idealism echoes the rationale of colonialism’s righteousness, as if one preconception of culture could be the best and most timeless. The elevation of high modernist poetry came with the silencing of other poets of the modern era, often poets connected with social and political issues which they addressed in their work, experimenting with form or directly with content. And most easily connectable is the praising of the written word as some kind of immune, ultimate, and aesthetic form. Cary Nelson has been a constant proponent of giving a voice to the unconsidered, and his latest Modern American Anthology looks to diversity to find “searing statements” that are “found perhaps nowhere else in our literature—perhaps nowhere else in our culture” (XXXIII).

Work Cited:

Nelson, Cary, editor. Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2015.

MacNeil, Courtney. “orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory,  https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/ Accessed 20 Sep. 2016.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres Sept 2016. https://blogs.ubc.ca/courseblogsis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216-sis_ubc_engl_470a_99c_2014wc_44216_2517104_1/unit-1/lesson-12/. Accessed 20 Sep. 2016