- Constantly surrounded by literate symbols. [Everyday life can’t go on without them].
- Illiterate = defective = primitive = savages.
- Homer; bible; colonialism o Events described in Homer happened several hundred years before composed. o Folktales/folkculture [homer] o Tremendous efforts to collect tales. [homer]
 [bible] divinity, religion.
 Priest goes to divinity school to become a priest.

Religion, religious studies [text; nature of].
 Historical problem of the time gap between the events described.
 Obvious variation from the old testament on different accounts.
Different details.
 Oral transmission.
 Homer & bible look familiar.

[colonialism] writing did not exist.

Discover that people that were non-literate [primary orality] were telling stories similar to Homer and the bible.
- What cultures were like before writing was invented, and how they differ from literate cultures before technologies were used? o Primary orality
– culture that has no relation with writing. o Non-Literate – people outside literate cultures. o Chirographic – culture that has writing. o Hyperliterate [people who write endlessly and casually]/Scribal [small route of professional scribes/higher class].
- 3500-3000 BCE
- Tally sticks [Shepard counting his sheep]
- Tokens, seals [identify something as your property/specific commercial problem]
- Earliest writing systems pictographs/ideographs. One symbol stands for one idea/thing. Symbols of tokens.
- Egyptian hieroglyphic [priestly writing].
- Chinese characters
- Syllabary
– 1 symbol = 1 syllable [dog-ma = dogman = phonetic representation]. o Syllabary and alphabet o Symbol means sound o Sound means thing o Alphabet.
- Changes in amount of lit and the kinds of lit develop different kinds of consciousness.

- Great divide theories vs. more nuanced theories of spectrum from orality to literacy.
- Technological determinism.
- Oral expression circulates in a culture where you have no backwards scan.
- Primary oral culture moves one way.
- Repetitive and additive.
- Subordinative clauses
– whole with parts – categories and subcategories.
- Genesis I – one detail after another – no summary.
1. Expression is additive rather than subordinative. a. Whole with parts – categories and subcategories.
2. Aggregative rather than analytic a. Pile up examples rather than analyze time to process.
3. Redundant or copious a. Tell them three times.
4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative a.
Traditional story stable and significant clichés are good.
5. Close to the human life world – ‘primary oral culture is little concerned with preserving knowledge of skills as an abstract, selfsubsistent corpus.’ a. Narrative.
6. Agonistically tones – ‘orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle’. a. Flat characters.
7. Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced. a. Responsive to audiences.
8. Homeostatic – ‘oral societies live very much in the present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance’. a. History is a product of writing. b. Folklore and technical manuals.
9. Situation rather than abstract
– people in oral cultures tend to think more about the situation – the here and now – rather than the abstract hypotherical.
Oral Derived Text
- Orality in composition, performance, and transmission.
- Oral traditional composition and its role in cultural memory.
- Formal qualities of oral composition. o How do you compose something that is an hour or two long without writing that is in poetic form. o Building blocks for story, scene and line. o Epithets
– wine dark sea. o Referentiality. o Repetition.
- Analysis of theogony and Genesis.
- Brief analysis of modern cosmogonies.
- Varying levels of literacy – both cultural and individual within culture.

- Origin and evolution of writing.
- Preview: background to Gorgias (origins of Greek literacy)