Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind

Museum of Verbal Art: A Parable

node—at least until you encounter the next invitation to explore something else within the network (or, more rarely, outside). Diversity of experience, but built-in limitations Through these methods you can cause Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind to morph and to engender different experiences every time you pick up the book for a reading session. Your friends and colleagues can do likewise, and you can confer with them to discuss and compare the various itineraries you’ve put together—all of them equally viable routes and none of them the single, exclusive, authorized route. As you cause the brick-and-mortar item to mirror network-navigation to the small degree that a tAgora artifact can, you’ll also sense the limits of an inherently pathwayless medium (Impossibility of tPathways). In short, you’ll gain another perspective on the homology of OT and IT and their contrast to textual technology. L Museum of Verbal Art: A Parable Museum and canon [Author’s/wikimaster’s note: What follows in this node is a story. It requires an effort of the imagination.] Imagine a museum that houses and displays the core of the literary canon— literature as we know it, or, more to the point, as generations of scholars and students have established its scope and identity.72 Visitors to this privileged edifice have the opportunity to trek through the most treasured of texts, to read and study what Western culture has identified as the very most important verbal art, from the ancient to the contemporary world. Admission is gratis, the stacks are open, and the ever-diligent library staff has even placed a suggestion box just inside the front door. But there is trouble brewing: the Museum of Verbal Art (MVA) is under serious threat. Losing accreditation After a lengthy and painful process of evaluation, the verdict is in: our muchadmired , elegantly appointed MVA—the cultural centerpiece and pride of the tAgora—has lost its accreditation. We’ve been duly notified, and the evidence is unfortunately compelling, that our collection is radically incomplete, even deeply biased in its parochialism. It’s true, alas. The relatively few cherished items chosen for public display have been gathering dust, undisturbed on their pedestals, for far too long. We’ve tried Museum of Verbal Art . 149 to upgrade by repackaging our exhibits, pasting on fresh new labels, shifting the viewer’s perspective this way and that, but none of these increasingly desperate strategies addresses the accreditation team’s most damning charge: that we’ve created an unrepresentative display of Homo sapiens’ verbal art (Homo Sapiens’ Calendar Year). And the criticism goes on. We’re told that generations of our curatorial staff have shirked their duty in assembling the museum collection. Relying on inherited and unexamined assumptions about what constitutes verbal art, they’ve foreshortened rather than broadened horizons. Sadly, an unblinking appraisal must admit that, until recently, our labors have all too often produced a circular result: we continue to celebrate what has always been celebrated, privileging those very artifacts from which we draw our criteria for selection. A kind of “subcultural narcissism,” one evaluator observed. Recent renovations On the bright side, over the last few decades complaints from visitors and experts alike have begun tostimulate dramatic and rewarding gains in many areas. Where arethelong-lostwomenauthors,youask?Nationwide,newgenerationsofscholars labor to bring women’s literature into plainer view. Where are the exciting new works by African American and Native American authors, you challenge? Again, the answer is gratifying: today’s reader-visitors are often as familiar with Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich as with William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, or Leo Tolstoy. In these and other once-marginalized areas, boundaries truly are expanding. New voices are entering the discussion, new champions are joining the fray, Herman Melville.­ Courtesy of Wikimedia. 150 . Museum of Verbal Art and the wizened old guard of canonical authors and texts is also profiting from immersion in a revitalized context of human diversity. The Museum of Verbal Art is inarguably a much more interesting place to visit these days. Nonetheless, we’ve apparently lost our accreditation. How could that possibly be? The silenced majority Living oral traditions Well, it turns out that the problem goes far deeper than our selection of tAgora texts, no matter how many and no matter how diverse. For even our most visionary curators have...