Gwen Groves Robinson

eBook, PDF

Talk to Text (eBook, PDF)

Ancient Origins of Western Prose and the Transition from Oral to Written Culture

Beschreibung

If talking and hearing are 'natural' modes of human communication, how then, did the artificial art of writing come to substitute so satisfyingly for them, and with such deft and commanding authority? Talk to Text: Ancient Origins of Western Prose and the Transition from Oral to Written Culture examines the history of the writing skills that we now practice so casually. These skills were never a human entitlement. Our literary ancestors worked for them, starting from crude scratches on bone, stone, and pottery shards. Over centuries of corrective nitpicking, the Greeks, the classical and papal Romans, the sixth- to eighth-century Irish and Anglo-Saxons, and the Franco-Germanic peoples of the Carolingian renaissance all helped to make writing a flexible and powerful means of communication. Out of speech for the voice and the ear, they invented this secondary route for the transfer of thought-and that route was through the eye. The impact of this spectacular shift and the eventual, even thrilling, development of writing as an art form are the twin topics of this book.

Technische Details

• Geräte: PC
• mit Kopierschutz
• Größe: 5.51MB

Barrierefreiheit

• Text-to-Speech

Autor

Gwen Groves Robinson is a wide-ranging, world-traveling scholar of language, with a BA in Greek from Bryn Mawr and an MA in English from Houston University. A former academic journal editor, she has authored a book on Tokyo, four novels, and ten articles on punctuation.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Februar 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781433161520
• Artikelnr.: 68467332

Rezensionen

"High-spirited and deliciously erudite, Talk to Text is a fascinating journey through what Gwen Groves Robinson calls the 'turmoiled development of prose.' She makes clear that the art of writing prose didn't just appear full blown; it had to be invented, and 'the history of prose's sluggish take-off is full of drama and conflict-and all too often sheer nuttiness.' Robinson's sly wit, clever phrasing, and vivid examples, from Greek and Latin literature and beyond, restore grammar to its long-lost etymological cousin, glamor."-Christopher Benfey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, Mount Holyoke College