The oral and beyond : doing things with words in Africa
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The oral and beyond : doing things with words in Africa
James Currey , University of Chicago Press , University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007
- [Chicago]: hbk
- James Currey : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-251) and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
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[Chicago]: hbk ISBN 9780226249711
Description
With her 1976 book Oral Literature in Africa, Ruth Finnegan almost single-handedly created the field of ethnography of language. Now, Finnegan has gathered and updated a selection of her best work on oral literature, performance, and the creative use of language in Africa, along with several new essays that broaden and extend her ideas. The Oral and Beyond looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, reviewing and critiquing the achievements of scholarship on African oral literature, revisiting issues of perennial contention, and highlighting some of the most interesting new ideas and approaches in the field. Exploring such fundamental questions as how texts and textuality relate to performance, how ideology inflects language, and how traditional forms adapt to modern media and popular culture, Finnegan essentially crafts an intellectual history of her field. At the same time, she propels the ethnography of language forward, bringing the techniques and knowledge developed through her fieldwork in Africa to bear on issues that transcend African studies and reach into the larger world of anthropology and beyond.
- Volume
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James Currey : pbk ISBN 9781847010018
Description
Renowned as the scholar who has made a whole generation of Africanists realise the singular importance of oral literature, Ruth Finnegan asks whether Africa can still be considered 'the oral continent'.
Africa has long been known as the oral continent, at once the home of oral literature, orature and orality, the oral background to the postcolonial literatures of today, and the inspirer of the voiced traditions of the diaspora. But does this image of Africa and orality still stand up to scrutiny?
In this new synthesis of her earlier and most recent work Ruth Finnegan illustrates the continuing interest of African verbal arts and performances and reflects on the related development of 'orality' studies through the decades since the 1960s. Her provocative conclusion is that it is time to abandon the long-entrenched image of Africa as 'the oral continent' and to adopt a more critical comparative perspective on 'the oral'.
RUTH FINNEGAN, FBA is Visiting Research Professor and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University and is the author of the classic study Oral Literature in Africa
North America: University of Chicago Press; South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press
Table of Contents
Introducing words I ENACTING & DISTANCING WORDS IN LIFE & STORY
The reflective practice of speech & language: a West African example
How to do things with words among the Limba
The arts & action of Limba storytelling
Stories of Africa, stories about Africa
II PERFORMING LITERATURE Literature as oral, the oral as literature
Is oral literature composed in performance?
Time, performance & literature
III WORKING WITH ORAL TEXTS Constructing 'Oral Literature in Africa': hindsights a generation later
Creating texts: transformation & enscription
Conceptualising oral texts & beyond
IV EPILOGUE Words, the human attribute?
by "Nielsen BookData"
