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Class 6 Notes

Page history last edited by Alan Liu 16 years, 3 months ago

Preliminary Class Business

 

  • Enrollment
  • The concept of our next class (and the nature of the readings)

1. Team Formation

 

  • Class members (our bios)
  • Communication session: Talk about
    • Your intellectual and literary interests
    • Any initial ideas you have for projects
    • Your skill set
  • Form Teams
  • Next steps

 

2. Text Analysis (Text "Models")

 

 

3. Text Analysis Tools & Examples

 

 

4. Thinking about Text Analysis

 

  • List

    • Jack Goody's research on early writing and lists, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977):

      "Particularly in the early phases of written cultures in the first fifteen hundred years of man's documented history, such materials are often presented in a form which is very different from that of ordinary speech, indeed of almost any speech. And the most characteristic form is something that rarely occurs in oral discourse at all (though it sometimes appears in ritual), namely, the list." (p. 80)

      [catalog of the kinds of writings found among tablets excavated since 1929 at the Syrian port of Ugarit, Goody, p. 86]

          1   Literary texts                                                  33
    2   Religious or ritual texts                                       31
    3   Epistles                                                        80
    4   Tribute                                                          5
    5   Hippic tests                                                     2
    6   Adminstrative, statistical, business documents:
 
          I  Quotas (conscription, taxation, obligations, rations,     127
                     supplies, pay, etc.)
         II  Inventories, miscellaneous lists and receipts              28
        III  Guild and occupational lists                               52
         IV  Household statistics and census records                     6
          V  Lists of personal and/or geographical names                59
         VI  Registration and grants of land                            16
        VII  Purchases and statements of cost or value                   5
       VIII  Loans, guarantees and human pledges                         7

    7   Tags, labels or indications of ownership                        18
    8   Other                                                           31
      "My concern here is to show that these written forms were not simply by-products of the interaction between writing and say, the economy, filling some hitherto hidden 'need,' but that they represented a significant change not only in the nature of transactions, but also in the 'modes of thought' that accompanied them, at least if we interpret 'modes of thought' in terms of the formal, cognitive and linguistic operations which this new technology of the intellect opened up." (p. 81)
    • Hayden White on the early "annals" form of history-writing; The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987)

      An excerpt from the Anglo-Saxon era Annals of Saint Gall that White considers (pp. 6-7):

       

            709.    Hard winter.  Duke Gottfried died.
      710.    Hard year and deficient in crops.
      711.
      712.    Flood everywhere.
      713.
      714.    Pippin, mayor of the palace, died.
      715.    716.  717.
      718.    Charles devastated the Saxon with great destruction.
      719.
      720.    Charles fought against the Saxons.
      721.    Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine.
      722.    Great crops.
      723.
      724.
      725.    Saracens came for the first time.
      726.
      727.
      728.
      729.
      730.
      731.    Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.
      732.    Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday.
      733.
      734.
  • Concordance
  • Edition/Archive

 

5. Initial Team Work

 

  • Group into your teams and talk/organize
  • Agree to meet once outside class before next Thursday
  • Edit another team member's bio
  • Try Tapor

 

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