The transition from orality to literacy is fascinating because one would naturally assume that a transition has three phases: How Things Were, How Things Are, and How Things Were in Between. In this case, the natural assumption is incorrect. How Things Were is a clearly identifiable stage, obviously separate from the others. In that stage, written language had not yet been invented. It is much more difficult to define How Things Are. Once the transition from orality began, literacy intermingled with orality, and since then the literate world has never cast the oral world away. How Things Are is essentially the most recent stop in the long journey that is How Things Were in Between, and perhaps it will always be. Nevertheless, this paper provide
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In the poem, Descartes’ daughter dies, so he builds and automaton who looks just like her because he believes that a human body is “nothing / but a machine made of earth,” so he should be able to make a machine and have that be a human body (Nuernberger 14-15). Within this narrative, the automaton is analogous to writing as a technology. When Descartes goes on a voyage with his automaton, it terrifies the ship’s crew, and their reaction is to throw it overboard. This fear of and refusal to accept new technology calls to mind Phaedrus, and the resistance to literacy documented within. The poem further connects to Ancient Greek philosophers by referencing Aristotle’s four elements in the first stanza, using a description of them to illustrate a time in which the technology Descartes used was unthought of. References to the past are juxtaposed with examples of more current understandings and technologies, creating tension that persists throughout the poem. The stubborn tension is similar to the persistent hold that orality has on literacy, because while “René” is vastly different from the Iliad, it, too, has whispers of oral qualities, such as the continual use of “or” rather than the use of a comma. But those whispers are just that: whispers. The literate poem is a completely independent entity, thus Replacement has not even a hint of the blue tint of
In the poem, Descartes’ daughter dies, so he builds and automaton who looks just like her because he believes that a human body is “nothing / but a machine made of earth,” so he should be able to make a machine and have that be a human body (Nuernberger 14-15). Within this narrative, the automaton is analogous to writing as a technology. When Descartes goes on a voyage with his automaton, it terrifies the ship’s crew, and their reaction is to throw it overboard. This fear of and refusal to accept new technology calls to mind Phaedrus, and the resistance to literacy documented within. The poem further connects to Ancient Greek philosophers by referencing Aristotle’s four elements in the first stanza, using a description of them to illustrate a time in which the technology Descartes used was unthought of. References to the past are juxtaposed with examples of more current understandings and technologies, creating tension that persists throughout the poem. The stubborn tension is similar to the persistent hold that orality has on literacy, because while “René” is vastly different from the Iliad, it, too, has whispers of oral qualities, such as the continual use of “or” rather than the use of a comma. But those whispers are just that: whispers. The literate poem is a completely independent entity, thus Replacement has not even a hint of the blue tint of