Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: -- Preface -- Introduction: Weighing Hearsay -- 1. Poetry Without Poems or Poets -- "Two or Three Hundred Rhythmic Formulae -- Festivals of Rhythm -- The Oral Style -- Formula as System -- Langue, Parole, and Constraint -- 2. Writing as One Form of Notation -- The Epic Cyborg -- "Word for Word" -- Stitches in Time -- 3. Autography -- The Inscribing Ear -- "Speech is a Movement" -- The Patois of Parnassus -- A Difference of Fifteen Cycles -- 4. The Human Gramophone -- "Errores Modernistarum" -- The Gospel of Movement -- A Bone Gallery -- "Four Obscure Jews" -- Gallo-Galilean Civilization -- 5. Embodiment and Inscription -- Materials Science -- Techniques of the Body -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

"A history of the concept of orality (that is, the creation and transmission of literary works without the use of writing), this book shows awareness of this medium emerging from the encounter of many literary and scientific developments (romanticism, post-symbolism, structuralism; physiology, psychology, the study of expression, anthropology; phonography, cinema)"-- Provided by publisher.

"Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the "device"-core ideas of modern literary theory-were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts-starting with Homer and the Bible-had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian "techniques of the body" as belonging to the domain of Derridean "arche-writing," Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices"-- Provided by publisher.

Description based on print version record.