Term Paper Presentations

Today we finished up with the memory things and then headed into our paper topics, again there was a wide variety, and much great information.
Jeremy did the names mentioned in Joyce's Ulysses Chapter entitled Cyclops, suck up, just kidding.
Sam did several poems relating to WWI and they were anti-war in tone, she always does such a great job of presenting, and really gets the audience involved.
Shawna did 50 Bob Marley songs, which I loved because I love that rasta man.
Then we started the papers, and Tracy discussed the levels of literate cultures in the Tolkien books, Lord of the Rings. Stating that writing is evil and in Gandar it can kill you.
Faith remarked on how she remembers going to sleep as a child listening to Noah's Ark on tape, and how she feels this can enhance your memory through listening. That listening is in important quality in an oral culture, and linking music to the oral culture which we have seen through Kane as well. She also brought up the idea that you can't write rhythmn and blues, and that it is a sort of improvisational technique that uses various chords to remind us of the rift, a very thought provoking topic.
Heather's inspiration for her paper was the video "Waking Life", and how words are symbols and they are dead. Language was created to communicate but becomes a problem when trying to talk about emotions such as love. Not only written word dead, but words, and by using words getting closer to communication.
Jeremiah gave us the Idiot's Guide to Oral Traditions, which I thought was a great idea.Took the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, stories that originated from the African Trickster stories and color-coded the entries to correspond with Ong's 9 forms of oral composition. Also pointing out the importance of flat characters to the oral tradition.
Nikole- focused on memorable thoughts, memory as well as passages from literature, song. Imparting on us again that the biggest sin is to forget and the most important things is to remember.
Stacy- writing is a benefit, but there is something great about oral culture, something that we should try and recapture.
Kristi spoke about her returning from the Peace Corps in Guinea, and the language, poolar that this man had created to assimilate more closely to the dialect and how this has a tremendous cultural and community identity.
Allison-Jabberwocky is Carroll's oral poem. Humpty Dumpty is the linguist, and every character recites a poem, although it is in a book, it is very close or is harkening back to the oral tradition in the same way and before Joyce did this in Finnegans Wake.
Cara- focused on the Ong idea of how writing reshapes conciousness, using the technique of psychoanalysis to dissect the quote. Very interesting to incorporate the Literary Criticism that she is taking now with this class.
Brian talked about the fictionalized audience: 1. writer must construct cast in role, the audience must also correspondingly fictionalize itself, whereas an oral audience is directly in front of bard. The conflicts that this creates in the written word.
Jennie talked about the power of the spoken word over the written, and how powerful those utterances are.
Josh-talked about eastern/indian music and how the ragga/talla is the muscial personality or the energy of the song. That there is a center in which the improvise around, similar to the structure of the epic poems or epithats. Very interesting.
All of the papers sounded fascinating, and it shows how different we all read the same text, that although the text is dead and formed in space and time, the readers still brings so much to the interpretation. And through these discussions and ponderance on the issues bring the words back to life.