Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect as messages, texts, practices, and traditions move and change, because issues of orality and literacy are especially complex and significant when information is transmitted over wide expanses of time and space or adapted in new contexts. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius’ Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter. Repeatedly they return to certain issues. Writing and orality are not mutually exclusive, and their interaction is not always in a single direction. Authors, whether they use writing or not, try to control the responses of a listening audience. A variable tradition can be fixed, not just by writing as a technology, but by such different processes as the establishment of a Panhellenic version of an Attic myth and a Hellenistic city’s creation of a single celebratory history.
Price: $214.00
Pages: 387
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Mnemosyne, Supplements
Publication Date:
06 June 2014
ISBN: 9789004269125
Format: Hardcover
"It is a rich collection, offering a wealth of material for thought. Many of the contributions present sources not often studied from the point of view of orality and literacy, and most of them underline that the ways of communication in antiquity were multifarious." Minna Skafte Jensen, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.02.41.
Ruth Scodel (PhD, Harvard 1978) is D. R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. Her many publications on Greek literature emphasize Homer and tragedy, including Greek Tragedy: an Introduction for Students (2010).