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The chapter discusses the uncertain hold of the theory of dialogism on the tensions between modernity, democracy, and dialogue. Bakhtin got it right. He made a philosophical discovery. He revealed the truth about language. He pushed the social study of the literary forward. The chapter goes on to demonstrate the relative failure of Author and Hero and Discourse in the Novel to secure a straight path from the simple fact of dialogue to the higher reaches of verbal art. Bakhtin refused to get a grip on the historical roots of the redemptive intersubjectivity embodied in the latter. There are distinct transformations that link Author and Hero to Discourse in the Novel and they are — the symmetry of language, politics, populism, consummation, and history. However a decade later the idea of dialogism effectively secularized all the older distinctions and with this secularity philosophy ceded its privileged role to the novel.

Step 4, the bulk of the Guide, comprises three parts: Part A, “Describe the Event and Its Genre(s) as a Whole”; Part B, “Explore the Event’s Genre(s) through Artistic Domain Categories”; and Part C, “Relate the Event’s Genre(s) to Its Broader Cultural Context.” Part A teaches readers how to collect information about an event and its genres. It advises readers to explore an event by looking through seven “lenses”: space, materials, participant organization, shape of an event through time, performance features, content, and underlying symbolic systems. Part B applies the seven lenses to exposing which—if any—elements of the following five artistic domain categories occur in the event: music, dance, drama, oral verbal arts, and visual arts. These arts are addressed in turn, so that readers can jump to the sections that relate most closely to their work. Part C helps readers to connect artistry in an event with broader cultural contexts. Numerous research questions, suggested activities, and practical examples are provided throughout Step 4.

This chapter considers some of the ways in which nonverbal repertoires that had been painstakingly created over two centuries of interaction were creatively mobilized by Indigenous and French individuals in the long seventeenth century to produce culturally-hybrid performances. Opening with the Great Peace of Montreal (1701), the chapter describes the epistemological differences that caused misunderstandings even as Jesuit missionaries and Indian orators skilfully blended visual and verbal metaphors and registers to reach their audiences during religious and diplomatic exchanges. The highly adaptable and multimedia nature of Indigenous verbal art is compared with the efforts of the Jesuits to insert select Indigenous gestures within their orations. Ambivalent feelings towards the unauthentic nature of theatrical performances and competition with Indian jongleurs (shamans) limited the missionaries’ ability to harvest the power of Indian oratory. As the French expanded westward and down the Mississippi valley in the second half of the century, they were forced to confront the limits of some of their nonverbal strategies, as demonstrated through the case-study of the calumet. After two centuries of embodied communication, it had become harder to tell “French” apart from “Native” nonverbal devices.

This chapter focuses on children’s folklore as ephemeral art. Children’s schoolyard lore teaches African American children and their friends, rhyme, rhythm, a form of public speaking, formalized game rules, cultural expectations, kinesic aptitude, and self-assurance. Schoolyard folkloric play lasts a short time, from around four to twelve years of age, but its influence can be profound. By age twelve schoolyard verbal play gets pushed off into some quiet corner of the mind, but the effects linger, as children move on to adolescent and mature pursuits equipped with facility in language, poise, a knowledge of game rules, and an awareness of cultural expectations. This book began with integration in 1967 in New Orleans, a process stressful for all, but particularly for African American children. It ends revealing that African American children managed to cling to their own mode of speech and their own play for over forty years. Play and verbal interactions still have the function of enabling children to be schoolyard artists.

The introduction orients readers to the aesthetic dimensions of biblical poems and argues that poems as verbal arts are not reducible to rhetoric or a single “message” but rather operate with an excess of meaning that both involves and transcends semantic content. It suggests that biblical poems can be fruitfully examined by considering what kinds of aesthetic experiences they offer. It draws on the work of Alva Noë and Susan Sontag to offer an embodied description of the intellectual work that poems can accomplish as art. The introduction also provides a succinct overview of its chapters.

Lyric poetry is a paradigmatic form of both oral and written verbal art, widely attested crossculturally and throughout history. The idea of lyric poetry in the Bible is not new, and yet sustained treatments of the topic in the field remain few. In the largest part of this chapter what is on offer is a phenomenological analysis of the lyric, a thick description of leading characteristics and practices associated with lyric verse generally (and generically), both for definitional purposes—to make available a robust and substantive working understanding of this kind of discourse—and as a means for transfixing (in an initial way) what of the biblical poetic corpus most felicitously may be described as lyric and how such poetry works (prosodically). The chapter concludes by examining the possibility of lyric discourse on an expanded scale (through consideration of the Song of Songs) and how the idea of lyric poetry may benefit a richer understanding of biblical poetry more broadly.

This chapter discusses prologues to commentaries on Horace's Ars poetica, written around 1150. Two anonymous texts are considered. The first, known as the ‘Materia’ commentary, deals with the medieval arts of poetry as well as the ‘six rules’ doctrine. The second text focuses on the use of Horace's work for the teaching of composition and assigns his work to logic rather than to ethics. It also looks at the verbal arts of the trivium.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between blues music and freestyle hip-hop music in the Mississippi Delta. Topnotch the Villain admits to growing up on blues music and that his musical style was definitely influenced by it. The chapter also discusses how the African American people of the Mississippi Delta create social spaces for the performance of verbal art.

This chapter elaborates on a predominantly oral performance tradition called Talamaddale which is linked to the popular traditional form of Yakshagana performed in the southern state of Karnataka, India. Unlike the song, dance, and spectacle of Yakshagana, Talamaddale is known for the improvisatory verbal skills of actors who engage in intricate debates around specific characters and situations from the Ramayana narrative and other puranas. Highlighting the performative aspects of Talamaddale, the chapter interrelates three layers of texts which are illustrated with vivid examples: the written prasaṅga or narrative; the songs from the prasanga sung by the bhāgawata or lead singer; and dialogues that are improvised between the actors in each performance. Focusing on the relationship between Talamaddale and the Ramayana narrative tradition, the chapter shows how episodes from the source texts are selected, elaborated, interpreted, and textured into argumentative performances in which different episodes from diverse versions of the Ramayana narrative come alive through debating techniques and verbal repartee.

This chapter focuses on analogy (since all neologisms are modeled on prior knowledge), creativity, and imagination. Types of language play discussed range from puns to games like Pig Latin, spoonerisms, Homer Simpson’s -ma- infixation, and expletive insertion. The domain for all of these involves the prosodic properties of output words. In figures of speech and rhetorical devices, motivated properties of words are extended to larger units of speech. Our final examples derive from verbal art. One is the playful creation of novel words, another includes innovations in the use of stacked prepositions.

Telling jokes and stories is an art form for both children and adults. The teller has to have good logical order, precise timing, and entertaining delivery to keep everyone’s interest. This chapter presents children’s jokes, listener’s comments, and catalogs both successes and failures. The jokes were told in racially mixed settings. The audience was fellow schoolmates, and the kibitzing is instantaneous. A child stumbling through his/her first attempts at joke and storytelling has to have tenacity and a tough outer skin.  Included in this chapter are transcripts of children telling stories as well as jokes and a long interview with ninth graders from Redeemer High School entertaining one another with stories and jokes that get progressively naughtier.