The Ethnography of Rhythm ─ Orality and Its Technologies

"Who speaks?" Core ideas of modern literary theory--the author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the "device"--were pioneered in the reflection on oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts--starting with Homer and the Bible--had emerged from an oral tradition, their understanding was greatly perturbed. This book retraces the history of the hypothesis of oral composition, focusing particularly on the period when ethnographic collection of contemporary oral texts came together with sound recording and new styles of literary analysis to cast a different light on canonical works. The genealogy of the concept, closely studied, shows when and how orality came to be polemically opposed to writing. In response, oral tradition is here shown to be a means of inscription in its own right, rather than as the natural forerunner made obsolete by all media and data-storage devices.

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 excavating the links among Paulhan, Jousse, Parry, Jakobson, Bogatyrev, MacLuhan, and a host of others, it makes possible a new understanding of Maussian "techniques of the body" as belonging to the domain of Derridean "arche-writing."

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Literatures and in the Committee on Social Thought. His books includeThe Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic, Great Walls of Discourse, and several edited books includingPartner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader.

Olga Solovieva is currently a post doc associated with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.