Or Words to That Effect: Orality and the Writing of Literary History ed. by Daniel F. Chamberlain and J. Edward Chamberlin (review)

This collection of nineteen articles begins with a two-page introduction by both editors. "Preliminaries" by J. Edward Chamberlin is followed by the first article, a magisterial discussion of the "Histories of Literature and the Question of Oral Literary History" by Daniel F. Chamberlain. Chamberlain's title signals the central theme of the collection. Although the book is volume twenty-six in the series, A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, it includes articles not only on minority European oral traditions (Basque and Romani) but also on other linguistic traditions – for example, two papers on Khoisan languages and stories in South Africa and an account of Guaman Poma's 1,200-page illustrated letter to Philip III of Spain. Paloma Diaz-Mas traces how "a poem by a canonical author of the Spanish Golden Age … passed down orally among the Sephardim of Morocco." Michael Asch intermixes a discussion of the oral and written components of treaty making in Canada with the story of his father's company, Folkways Records. The final two articles both point to the future. Federico Augusto Garcia Fernandes argues that after cultural studies "there is no longer room in academia for a literary history as it was configured in the twentieth century" and calls for a synchronic analysis of oral poetry. Amid its contexts of production and reception, Maria Teresa Vilarião Picos provides both an overview and an analysis of the ways in which the new media have changed the oral/written distinction to the point that (she quotes Giselle Beiguelman) "the interface is the message." Certainly, the words "literature" and "literary" still remain a problem, with their implications of the phonetic alphabet, universal literacy, a standardized national language, and a celebrated literary canon. Nonetheless, Chamberlin states that he and his colleagues use the word "literature" to include both written and oral forms of expression, which he characterizes as "occasionally contentious to polemicists on one side or the other," which I guess makes me a polemicist. What is the effect of talking about "literariness" with respect to the aesthetics of oral expression? Interestingly, he frequently uses the word "stories," which, for me anyway, works just fine as a descriptor for verbal art, traditional or modern. However, the collection generally bypasses much work on terminology in the United States and Canada – for example, by Susan Gingell – which is best instantiated in the introduction to the collection she co-edited with Wendy Roy, Listening Up, Writing Down and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written and Visual. However, Lee Haring in his bracing discussion notes that different "textual communities" use different terminologies.

The collection contains two pieces by storytellers, but, in fact, narrative style marks both Chamberlin's piece (we hear about his hunting up north, his encounter with the Rastifari, and much else of interest) and Daniel Heath Justice's four "lessons in silence" that connect the profoundly personal with the highly philosophical. The narrative appeal of two close readings of transcribed oral texts by Andy Orchard and Neil ten Kortenaar reminds us how hard academic writing usually is to read. This difference is the topic of David R. Olson, who discusses rationality in two forms of discourse: the narrative and the paradigmatic.

Keavy Martin uses a close reading of Al Purdy's poems on the Arctic to frame a discussion the difficulties of teaching Arctic oral traditions in southern literature classrooms. Perhaps we can do better following the pedagogical example of storytellers, whose audience is right there, either listening intently or nodding off. Chamberlin's article reminds us that literary history unfolds in time; oral stories are rarely dated. Where they originate matters far more; sometimes it is Jackal and sometimes it is Raven. Here is where I missed Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places on the Western Apache. However, because of the cultural location...