“说”出集体性——口述性（orality）与20世纪40年代的解放区小说

20世纪40年代解放区小说中,经常出现一种作为情节生产者的"非角色化"叙述者,和作为假想主体的"情境外"叙述接受者,二者之间的遥相呼应完成了叙事传达和接受的想象交流。这种叙述者和叙述接受者之间口述性的共时交流成功地使这类作品易于为农村普通读者接受。口述性的仪式化结构更为解放区作家虚拟了一种"集体性"景象,并为他们提供了使之合法化的叙述工具。     

Cooking up: Intestinal economies and the aesthetics of specular orality

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to make a psychoanalytical contribution to a cultural studies understanding of the logics — and fantasies — of commmodity consumption in the visual culture of late capitalism. Taking up the metaphor of the gut as a discriminating organ and of cooking as a textual production, we examine the relations between oral and ocular consumption, and between aliment and excrement, as expressed in two films from the 1980s which are centred around themes of food and money. Adrian Lynne's 9½ Weeks and Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and her Lover employ quite different aesthetics and display contrasting inflections of what we call ‘the edible complex’. The first fantasizes wealth as enabling an unstructured excess of consumption that can only end in exhaustion; the second reaffirms the structured distinctions associated with ‘quality’ in a class-divided society where wealth alone does not secure status or legitimacy. From a feminist perspective, the male characters in each text are interesting examples of masculinities not organized around the phallus, but around anal and oral eroticisms and a more primitive oral morality.     

Anonymous voices and authorship politics in printed genealogies in Eastern Guizhou

This paper analyzes two versions of a printed genealogy collated by the Hmub and Kam in Eastern Guizhou, who gave authority to claims of consanguine bonds. It focuses on how the main text of the genealogy and other intertextual practices can either attribute authority to the genealogies or undermine it. On the one hand, elite accounts of ancestors in the genealogies invent a strong ideology of consanguinity that directly contributes to the text’s authority. At the same time, however, the use of Chinese characters to represent the Hmub phonetic system coexists with the Hmub system of patronymy within the assemblage of the individual descendant names. In other words, Chinese characters represent nonpersonal phonetic symbols of the Hmub language. This in turn means that anonymous voices can emerge in other texts. The result is a shift in the nature of authorship from an overtly collective authority to a covertly diffused anonymity.     

Ceremony,charters and social memory: property transfer ritual in early medieval Catalonia

ABSTRACT

Work on the use of documents in the Middle Ages has now accepted that written record-keeping in Europe did not collapse with Roman rule, to be replaced only by orality and memory, but continued throughout the period, albeit to greater or lesser extents from place to place. Nonetheless, much remains unclear about how documents were actually used and understood following the Roman collapse, and how far that reflected continuity with the past. Using the numerous early medieval charters from modern Catalonia, this article argues that, instead of registration in public archives as under Rome, documents here were validated by social consensus about their contents, created by repeated recitation of the texts. This could even be used to create new documents. The article argues that this was an innovative replacement of older institutions of record intended to enable continuing document use, but that it blurs categories both of literacy and orality and of continuity and change; continuity of the land charter was here maintained despite the discontinuity and irrelevance of many other practices. Both documents and their users were agents in these processes, in ways that can instruct us about institutional survival and replacement in times of social change.