Saturday, January 17, 2009

Yummm...Oral Hash


I saw master blogger Chris's blog today and am responding the the title: "Oral Hash". Hash is the coming together, the hodgepodge of many different elements (the elements in the food have not yet been identified). Or, hash is a bricolage. Post-modernism is one of my favorite genres to read and study, and critics use the term bricolage to describe how, in an imaged based world, we rearrange, or rehash, old images (often of nostalgia) to try and create somthing new. I'm sure I will talk about post-modernism all semester, so I don't want to get too excited. But a principle idea is that there are no facts, only images, which have taken the place of reality. We communicate through images, the powers of suggestion, and the technological advancements that have done more to enslave us than emancipate us.

In class it was mentioned that language is ephemeral, to capture it, make it concrete and contractual we must write it down. It would seem to me then that there is an inherent freedom in orality and a restraint in textuality. Maybe that is why Shakespeare did not intend for his plays to be written, but spoken. Here, also, is were I see an example of "oral textuality". By reading a play, something that is meant to be spoken, the words are captured for our study, but they are spoken for our fancy. It is language stuck somewhere in between. It is text with more freedom and orality with more restraint. But even text has "free play", and an author may give it that in order to try and create somthing new in a world where metaphors have become hackneyed and trite. This is a type of bricolage, a sort of empty parody, or pastiche, on previous convententions--not intended to villify but to create something new. But in this post modern world the images, the textuality of it all, is controlling our voices and our actions, not the other way around. Whereas our reality used to be a result of our consciousness (speech thought provided for text), our consciousness is now a result of our reality (text provides for speech and thought).

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