Orality And Literacy in Modern Italian Culture

In our highly literate culture, orality is all-pervasive. Different kinds of media and performance--theatre, film, television, story-telling, structured play--make us ask what is the relation between improvisation and pre-meditation, between transcription and textualization, between rehearsal, recollection and re-narration. The challenge of writing orality has a technical side--how do young writers 'represent' the spoken language of their contemporaries? What are the rules governing the transcription of oral evidence in fiction and non-fiction?--but also a political and philosophical one: is the relationship between oral and written always a hierarchical one? Does the textualization of the oral destroy, more than it commemorates or preserves, the oral itself? Twelve wide-ranging essays explore these questions in the most up-to-date account of orality and literacy in modern Italian culture yet produced.