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This essay pursues a detailed examination of Joyce's poetic language along with the relation of Chamber Music to his later prose writings. Focusing on Joyce's response to the contrary examples of Verlaine and Rimbaud as he begins to explore the modes of modernist poetry, the essay argues that Joyce's “creative translation or mistranslation” of precursor poets reveals a nascent hard and critical modernity that pushes against the poems' apparent sentimentality and archaism. In a far-ranging study of Joyce's uses of orality and aurality, the essay reveals the connections between the early poems and Joyce's final poetic utterances in Finnegans Wake, all of which depend upon an oblique use of language, a “cambering” of utterance that shifts words away from poetic constraints, then back again to poetic forms.

Chapter 4 explores the debate around enthusiasm in late Stuart England. After looking at the French Prophets’ millenarian assemblies, during which they performed Biblical allegories and miracles, it considers how enthusiasts and dissenters took advantage of the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 to promote their beliefs. With their claims to divine inspirations and insight into the future, the French Prophets sparked a spectacular battle of pamphlets of at least 150 extant titles in just three years. This controversy contributed to the early Enlightenment debate on the nature of enthusiasm. It shows how beliefs in witchcraft and demonic possessions persisted beyond 1700 and how satire became a weapon against enthusiasts in general. The case of the French Prophets would later serve as a precedent against the Methodists in the mid eighteenth century.

This chapter introduces and provides and overview of the unique discourse structures, like the class meeting, that Methodism pioneered. Specifically, it traces the development of Methodist discourse from the wild and raucous beginning of the movement in 1738 until the death of John Wesley in 1791, after which the fundamental character of Methodism and its discourse structures changed. The emphasis in this chapter is especially on how early Methodists combined oral, manuscript, and print mediation practices to create a diverse, diffuse, and fundamentally unstable and uncontrollable discourse culture which had impacts on literary developments like the rise of the novel and the literature of sensibility. In particular it argues that early Methodism should be read in terms of what William Warner calls a “media event,” which made possible new means and protocols of mediation within a space of contestation and debate over what Methodism was and how dangerous its effects could be.

As Chapter Four demonstrates, the murals were part of the efflorescence of Nyaungyan and Konbaung dynasty literary activity, visual counterparts to vernacular, Pāli, and dramatic productions. The narratives in the Burmese wall paintings were new tellings of old stories, drawing on Pāli texts and oral traditions, that were shaped to serve the purposes of the temples that housed the murals, reflecting the established repertoire, the desires and goals of donors, and the roles of the artists and monk producers. This chapter explores the various ways in which Burmese wall paintings connected with and related to “words,” both of the written and spoken variety. Textually and visually, Burmese wall paintings incorporated literary concepts in three main ways. First, the prose captions of the murals functioned as glosses to the visual narrative. Secondly, the popularization of drama and narration in Burmese society connected with a focus on an extended narrative format in the murals. Thirdly, the embellishments of descriptive prose and poetry paralleled the illustration of elaborate settings in the murals. The wall paintings formed a nexus of oral, visual, and textual traditions, linking them together through biographical memorialization.

The introduction situates Joseph Smith's oral composition of the Book of Mormon within the religious and rhetorical culture of early nineteenth-century America. In an extended oral performance, Smith gazed into a seer stone and dictated the Book of Mormon to his scribes. The study focuses on orality, oral performance, and the oral composition techniques that Smith used to dictate the work. The introduction also includes a brief summary of the Book of Mormon narratives, along with a discussion on the academic framework for understanding seer stones in the context of Western esotericism and folk magic.

Chapter 2 turns to the textual history of the “Childhood Deeds.” The first half identifies problems related to our conceptions of how texts functioned in the ancient world and the way that modern assumptions about textual unities, titles, and genre have constrained scholars in their engagement with this set of infancy stories. This analysis offers a more textured account of ancient reading practices as involving a complex intersection of written texts and oral performance. The second half of the chapter then traces the history and formation of the “Childhood Deeds” as a text, beginning with its early oral and written transmission in the form of individual literary units or story types, and continuing with the editing and collection of those stories into a larger narrative schema. This analysis is grounded in the close examination of two kinds of evidence: the witness of manuscripts and the history of external citation.

“The Changing Same” discusses a story from the oral tradition of Dahomey that Melville Herskovits published in the second volume of Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938) as a source for exploring the history and legacy of the slave trade and slavery. The story may be read in several ways and through Pressley-Sanon’s exploration of its multiple meanings, Istwa across the Water argues that contemporary explorations of such stories from the oral tradition add valuable dimensions to our understanding of the continuities and ruptures that constitute the relationship between Africa and its diaspora.

The Introduction focuses on the differences between ancient and modern experiences of martyr texts. In particular, it explores how ancient audiences might have received these stories: aurally within communal settings, particularly in church settings. It examines the ways martyr texts employ techniques of oral delivery to engage audiences emotionally. It differentiates the cultural contexts of modern and ancient audiences that affect the ways the texts can be understood: what cultural knowledge is required to engage fully with martyr texts?

The conflation of voices in Caribbean literature reflects is oraliture – a heterophonic layering of voices inducing specific rhythmic patterns, which entail a great deal of linguistic and cultural negotiations to be recovered in translation. This particular aspect is quite representative of Olive Senior's stories. In this paper, the author discusses the difficulties that she faced when translating Senior's diglossic stories, in which several lects collide in a very few pages, identifying the major problem as being that of revealing this linguistic conflict and dissonance, while managing to remain within most readers’ reach. The complex original enunciative system at work invites an intercreative process, engendered by intercultural dialogue. However, it also calls for ‘creativity within bounds’ – that is the bounds of both languages-cultures concerned in an attempt at creating a new ‘mosaic-whole’, a new assemblage of ‘hetero-elements’ seeming to compose an incoherent structure, but which nevertheless fashions a new creative whole.

This chapter looking at the treatment of voice in the translations, conceptualising translation as a form of ventriloquism or theatrical re-enactment of a text. It picks out examples of comic mimicry and mimetic speech-patterning in the translations, before moving to the musical shaping of the prose as evidenced by word order, semantic environment, cadence, imitative harmony and punctuation. The presence of interwoven voices is then extended to the meanderings of consciousness, showing an astute alertness to Dostoevskian trains of thought and polyphony. This is carefully traced by setting Woolf and Mansfield’s co-translations alongside other translators’ works, in their era or after, thereby making the value and originality of their achievements more tangible. The patterns and inflexions of Russian prose prove to be splendidly rendered in semantically precise yet poetically suggestive co-translations.

This paper analyzes the early film writing of Georg Lukács, particularly ‘Thoughts Towards an Aesthetic of the Cinema’ (‘Gedanken zu einer Ästhetic des Kino’, 1913), from the perspective of the oral mode of communication and expression, or, orality. It considers that the essence of the orality lies with the embodied engagement of human beings, basing on Walter J. Ong’s ideas of the orality-literacy hypothesis. With such understanding, it argues that the moving image can be the technological redemption of the orality, and suggests that the visual revival of the orality depends on but beyond the optical perception, necessarily involving the spectatorial embodiment. Lukács’s understandings towards the primitive moving-images imply that the revived orality in the visual can reside in two aspects: the mimetic representation of the moving image, and the intersubjective engagement between the two-dimensional screen world and the three-dimensional real world in the cinema experience. Additionally, this paper elucidates such hypothesis of the moving-image redemption of orality with a case study on a digital documentary Life in a Day (dir. Kevin Macdonald, 2011, 95 min.), for the purpose of suggesting the relevance of Lukács’s early thoughts to the recent digital culture and scholarly-discussions on the cinematic ‘affect’.

Chapter 5 proposes that, while the incorporation of aspects of popular culture in literary texts is not new, it takes on new significance in the context of the distinction between the popular as ‘ours’ and the elite as ‘unpatriotic’ in Bolivarian rhetoric. In addition, the ‘popular’ as celebrated by the Bolivarian Revolution is defined by the national and often the indigenous. Popular culture in terms of globalised media are condemned as neo-imperialist. Bajo las hojas (Centeno, 2010), Chulapos Mambo (Méndez Guédez, 2011), Transilvania unplugged (Sánchez Rugeles, 2011) and El niño malo cuenta hasta cien y se retira (Chirinos, 2004) are all novels that blur the boundaries between elite and popular culture. Popular is understood here as genres such as the gothic, comedy and detective fiction with mass appeal and as global media and the internet. El niño malo… also incorporates aspects of indigenous story-telling to assert that this cultural legacy is not the preserve of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The introduction outlines the book and analyses previous historiography and perspective regarding senatorial relationships and Roman politics. This book offers a new way of understanding elite relationships, based upon face-to-face communication and the circulation of information through personal oral contact between members of the elite and their entourage. Roman politics, based upon ever-changing and short-lived alliances established over a particular issue, were constructed through the constant transmission and circulation of political information. For the proper functioning of the system, Roman senators had to be constantly informed about their peers’ opinions and intentions.

The chapter opens with the famous story of Petrarch’s mountain walk on which he carried a copy of Augustine’s Confessions in his pocket. What is the significance of a book’s portability? The key question in the chapter concerns an obvious but little-observed correspondence between the pages of a codex and a pair of hands. The book creates a prosthetic relationship with the body, acting in a triangle between hand, eye, and mouth. In the midst of this opens out a longstanding philosophical quarrel about orality and the written (and about silent reading) in literary history, from classical times to Nietzsche. The argument here is for a more open acknowledgement of the book as a transitional object, including analysis of books in works of art, and finishing with a discussion of reading in Cicero and in Dante.