Orality, literacy, and the representation of thought

Authors

  • Wallace Chafe University of California, Santa Barbara Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.33544

Keywords:

Orality, Literacy

Abstract

Oral traditions have been limited in their ability to present the full range of a character’s experiences, focusing for the most part on overt actions rather than a character’s inner thoughts. The invention of writing has given writers the ability to reach a distant and often unknown audience and the leisure to mold language in new ways. Writers have thus acquired the ability to place a reader inside a character’s thoughts, either as they are experienced from the inside with mimesis, or by commenting on them omnisciently from the outside with diegesis. Examples are provided of each method of presentation.

Author Biography

  • Wallace Chafe, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Wallace Chafe is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He divides his time and energy between documenting several Native American languages and trying to understand how speaking relates to thinking. As early as 1970 he foregrounded the dominant role of meaning, as opposed to syntax, in a book called Meaning and the Structure of Language. Another book in 1994 called Discourse, Consciousness, and Time focused on ways in which conscious thought influences the shape of language. A parallel interest in differences between speaking and writing led him to investigate ways in which writers of fiction represent the consciousness of their protagonists. More recently he has been concerned with distinguishing thoughts from semantic structures, where each language organizes thoughts in its own way.

References

Chafe, Wallace (1994). Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing. The University of Chicago Press.

Chafe, Wallace (Forthcoming). Thought-Based Linguistics: How Languages Turn Thoughts into Sounds. Cambridge University Press.

Cohn, Dorrit (1978). Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Corballis, Michael C. (2015). The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When you’re Not Looking. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Eliot, George (1872). Middlemarch. Blackwood.

Joyce, James (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: B.W. Huebsch.

Lüthi, Max (1970). Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

McHale, Brian (1978). Free Indirect Discourse: a Survey of Recent Accounts. PTL: a Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3: 249-287.

Opie, Iona and Peter. (1974). The Classic Fairy Tales. Oxford University Press.

Published

2017-07-13

Issue

Section

Feature Article

How to Cite

Chafe, W. (2017). Orality, literacy, and the representation of thought. Writing and Pedagogy, 9(1), 15–20. https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.33544

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