“The importance of ancient Greek civilization to all the world was beginning to show in an entirely new light: it marked the point in human history when deeply interiorized alphabetic literacy first clashed head-on with orality.”
Poetry was the theme throughout this text and the idea behind the quote above is that the writing down and “collaboration” of poetry has changed how poems are remembered and reversed. To sum up, in my opinion, what chapter two was about is that the epic poems of Homer are a combination of literature used by others. Homers work seemed to be made up of clichés, but as many people have said Homer was no beginner poet or a poor poet at all. In my opinion, Homer used the themes we all know and told them in a great way.
Where remediation comes into factor is how the orality of poems changed when written word came to play. The ability of the poet to change, reinvent, and reshape the oral poems became difficult. “In an oral culture, knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost: fixed, formulaic thought patterns were essential wisdom and effective administration.” From this quote you can also see the positive side to written language for the fact that it was permanent and can be “easily” accessed. I put easily in quotes because in the past it was more difficult to find printed work than it is in the age of internet.
You're definitely on to something when you say that "the ability of the poet to change, reinvent, and reshape the oral poems became difficult" when using the written word...which actually looks ahead to interesting things regarding revisions and editing of texts after publication, and, in fact, what IS possible with online/electronic publishing...
ReplyDeleteI agree with you completely about how easy it would be for an only oral poet to change what he/she said every time. Switching to a literature based society seems to be keeping people honest because of how easy it is for them to write it down what the person said and check the facts.
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