Orality to Literacy: Survival of Literature

Abstract

Homo sapiens have existed for more than 50000 years on earth, yet the earliest written script dates back to just over 5000 years. Our traditional primary oral epics, folk-tales, and myth have an unknown and unexplored history of oral tradition, a performance which had its own artistic, ‘literary’ values. Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord showed how this comparison could throw light on the transformation of orality into literacy, after their discovery of oral-formulaic style in Homeric epics and Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. We have to explore what role did and does Memory and mnemonics play in the cultural and academic appreciation of a text in this transformation from orality to literacy. An exploration of the transformation of orality towards literacy is certainly worthy of scholarly pursuits if we are sensitive enough to the differences among different forms of cultural expressions as well as the complementarity among them. We also wonder why so many great lyrics, and poetry of the global literature have failed to survive in the popular domain beyond academic disciplines. Also, the existence of a text by an author is also now doubtful due to certain Postmodernist claims. How far and how long literature could survive in a formal, academic environment without the dynamism, animation, and individuality associated with oral traditions? The answer lies in discovering what sacrifices had been made when ancient oral epics were preserved in written scripts instead of the human memory and in finding out the traces of regret even in written literary texts;