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Empathetic and Participatory

Oral

The oral culture is empathetic and participatory (Ong 36-57).

  • While telling the story, the narrator slips into the first person every once in a while, reciting as though he is the hero.
  • Its members identify with the information and become immersed in it until the observer and observed are one.
  • When incorporating research into writing, its members plagiarize wholesale, writing as if all information is a part of and indistinguishable from her- or himself, even though is comes from research performed by someone else. They use no credit tags, words in a sentence that indicate the source of a quotation, paraphrase, or summary.

Examples

Islamic society breathes its history. Other societies study their history. That's extremely difficult for post-Islamic societies to understand.

-- Note on the "Insight" column spoken by Paul Liptz,
Israeli social historian, in a meeting with the editorial board.
San Antonio Express-News, Sunday, May 2, 2004, section H, p. 1.

 

Gracie Hart: Oh my gosh, it's the crown!
Victor Melling: Yes, you can taste it now can't you!
[Gracie, pointing at her head, is taken to the stage]
Victor Melling: You will wear the crown, be the crown! You are the crown!

Miss Congeniality

What is essential for students of literature and fiction to know?

"I'm going to say it's the ability to hear and tell the stories of our own families and cultures," Yamashita said. "We need to develop an ear for the narratives that surround us in our daily lives and we need to learn how to tell our own stories to others, because the way we tell our stories is often the lens through which we envision the world. What we have here in the United States is a troubling, complicated mosaic. So many of us are exiles, but we're not tourists. We all live here together--and yet we don't seem to share the same narratives or narrative structures. But we can develop our ability to hear what's different and the same in different cultural narratives. And out of all these layers of narratives comes a shared framework for looking at the world."

-- KarenYamashita, Univ. of Cal. - Santa Cruz Professor of
literature / creative writing

Literate

The literate culture observes objective distance. Its members

  • Check sets of written information against each other and the other references in which the community stores its important records.
  • Live with the awareness that a person is a person and the cultural stories and other information sets exist separately and independently from one's identity.
  • Accept responsibility for testing the value of information sets and claim the freedom to embrace the ones that are both personally and societally beneficial and the duty and obligation to reject the destructive ones.
  • When incorporating research into writing, distinguish clearly between their own ideas and findings that come from others' research. They know the difference, and they show it by using credit tags, words in a sentence that indicate the source of a quotation, paraphrase, or summary.

Example

God (played by Morgan Freeman): People want me to do everything for them. What they don't realize is that they have the power. You want to see a miracle? Be the miracle.

Bruce Almighty (Who is oral here and who operates literately?)

Books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

-- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
(Can it be said that the stories in an oral culture speak to one another?)

Exception: Primally-strong emotions trigger a default back to the oral mode.

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