Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Introduction. Rethinking Orality: Some Reasons for a Research -- The Sources of Orality: Belief, Opinion, Acceptance -- Words, Gestures, Brains and Caves. Remarks on the Material Bases of Language -- Epigenetic Cell Memory -- Some Remarks on Orality and the Antinomy between Writing and Speaking in Western Linguistic Thought -- Beyond Orality: The Case of Sign Languages -- Epic and Ethology: The 'Saddleback Model'. An Analogical Model for the Study of Archaic Greek Epic -- To Speak Like a Bird: Beyond a Literary Topos -- Epos and Paideia between Orality and Writing -- Muses and Teachers: Poets' Apprenticeship in the Greek Epic Tradition -- From Oral Theory to Neuroscience: a Dialogue on Communication -- Plato and the Charm of Epideictics in the Menexenus -- Erga Gynaikon: Female Supremacy in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women -- Index of Discussed Passages -- Index of Notable Things
The volume deals with the mechanisms of the oral communication in the ancient Greek culture. Considering the critical debate about orality, the analysis of the communicative system in a predominantly oral-aural ancient society implies a reassessment and a deep reconsideration of the traces which orality embedded in the texts transmitted to us. In particular, the focus is on the 'cultural message', a set of information which is processed and transmitted vertically as well as horizontally by a living being, so to be differently from a genetically encoded information, a culturally defined process. The survey intertwines different approaches: the methodologies of cognitivism, biology, ethology, to analyze the embrional processes of the cultural messages, and the tools of historical and literary analysis, to highlight the development of the cultural messages in the traditional knowledge, their codification, transmission, and evolutions in the dialectics between orality and writing. The reconstructed pattern of the mechanisms of cultural messages in a prevailing oral-aural system cast a light on a shadowy aspect of a sophisticated communication system that has long influenced European culture.
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license: