Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione
Prize for Comparative Literary Studies
Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text,
intertextuality, the "device"--core ideas of modern literary
theory--were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless,
loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to
critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally
significant texts--starting with Homer and the Bible--had emerged from
an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly
perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and
China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the
study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also
demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic
creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian "techniques
of the body" as belonging to the domain of Derridean "arche-writing,"
Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its
own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word
or other media and data-storage devices.