• Corpus ID: 194195416

The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer

@inproceedings{Doane1994TheEO,
  title={The Ethnography of Scribal Writing and Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Scribe as Performer},
  author={Alger Nicolaus Doane},
  year={1994}
}

• A. N. Doane
• Published 1994
• Art, Linguistics

What is the nature of writing and what is the role of the scribe in a culture in which speech has not lost its primacy? If we think of AngloSaxon scribal writing in terms of “ethnopoetics,” we can think of human responses to the voice, of a scribe obeying the somatic imperatives voice imposes, with text being as much act, event, gesture, as it is thing or product, with its origins not just in prior texts, but in memory and context. John Miles Foley has shown how written documents can never be equivalent to spoken acts and yet he also stresses and demonstrates that we can and must derive performance traces from them (1992:290-91). And Dell Hymes has often stressed the personal and particular as an essential category in the study of “ethnopoetics.” In his view, traditional texts are not just vessels of trans-individual “meaning” deriving from a tradition or of linguistic facts reducible to one structuralist patterning or another. As he has demonstrated in “Language, Memory, and Selective Performance: Cultee’s ‘Salmon’s Myth’ as Twice Told to Boas,” traditional texts must be put to the test of what he calls “practical structuralism” (1985:393):