In this world, primarily
oral cultures are doomed to inferior status.
Four "engines" are driving us into an
oral culture by 2050.
The Black lexis, ripe with the
oral culture of Africa, gives the Black artist a fantastic history of metaphorical awareness and metaphorical choices (Smitherman 1973: 265), many of which are used in rap music.
In
oral cultures, complex cultural evolution is impossible because the units of selection reside within individual human brains.
"We have always tried to walk the line between the
oral culture and the world of academic science" he says.
Here Spencer concludes that even though Bradbury depicts a "predominately
oral culture as mind-numbing" (73), the preservers of texts are nonetheless those who memorize and recite.
The book attests to the indelible power of our
oral culture.
Chapter 2 outlines the ways in which the commedia dell'arte's improvisational rules adapted the strictly oral Homeric formulae to suit the requirements of the drama in a residually
oral culture. Thus, for example, when the romantic plots that the actresses brought from the commedia erudite became the norm, opposite pairs of actors would improvise the dialogue to advance the action and prepare for the next entrances.
Not surprisingly, then, Hesse also documents a backlash against women authors, just as, previously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, had attacked women's prominence in the
oral culture of salons.
In a village like Buin, with a strong
oral culture, local people could remember where soldiers had died.
(People needed virtue, so Zeus gave it to them.) Havelock reminds us that knowledge in an
oral culture can really only be codified as figures engaged in action: "data...have to be stated as events in time."(13) Havelock also reminds us that "the basic grammatical expression" associated with the oral tradition "would be simply the phrase 'and next....'"(14) Writing, on the other hand, permits knowledge to be formulated in "a syntax, [in] which [abstract assertions are] true for all situations and so timeless."(15) Simonides's poem, at least the heart of it, consists of an abstract, hence "timeless," assertion.
Eke); "Writing in the Wind: Recreating
Oral Culture in an Online Community" (Chuck Hays); "Hands-On Communication: The Rituals Limitations of Web Publishing in the Alternative Zine Community" (Jennifer Rauch); and "Grappling with Gendered Modernity: The Spectacle of Miss World in the News" (Radhika E.