The Struggle Between Oral and Script Cultures and Its Effect on Narrative Development (Communications, Typography; Britain, France)
Vande Berg, Michael James
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/71468
Description
Title
The Struggle Between Oral and Script Cultures and Its Effect on Narrative Development (Communications, Typography; Britain, France)
Author(s)
Vande Berg, Michael James
Issue Date
1984
Department of Study
Comparative and World Literature
Discipline
Comparative and World Literature
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, Comparative
Abstract
Communications historians have in the last several decades begun to trace the outline of a great cultural shift which began with the invention of the phonetic alphabet and accelerated with the invention of print, and which saw man proceed from conceiving of the world primarily in oral terms to conceiving of it in terms of sight.
This emerging historical framework can help to account for the appearance and development of several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narrative techniques: the rise and fall of intrusive narrators, mock readers, rhetorical typography, and epistolary fiction are manifestations of the last stages of oral culture; while the appearance of free indirect style and of multiple narrators within individual works marks the victory of script culture.
French and English writers both respond in their works to this struggle between oral and script culture, but French and English narrative development differ because French culture was more receptive, and adapted more easily, to the conviction that the written word was essentially a visual rather than an oral medium of communication.
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