Izlaganje sa skupa

INTERPERFORMATIVITY AND BEOWULF

Ward Parks ; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Sažetak

Whether it was itself composed orally or in writing, tile Old English Bcowulfis profoundly indebted to the world of orality on which it draws and into which it offers itself as performed artistic utterance. In an obvious sense, then, any informed interpretation of the poem must, in one of its movements, detextualize the text as thing and reconstitute it imaginatively as event. Yet the performance event entails far more than just a specific perfonnance occasion; indeed, the text of Beowulf contains no direct allusions to performance in this sense. Rather, the poem consistently orients itself towards oral traditional diachmny, which interpenetrates the narrative on several levels. On the level of the act of narrating, diachrony as the collective rememberance of past utterance emerges as the source of poetic discourse, both when the poet authenticates his narrative through the formula "I heard," and when he draws on traditional aphorism as a standard by which to evaluate his characters. On the level of the action itself, a belief in the immediate pertinence of diachrony is exhibited by the many digressions into genealogy and tribal history. Both forms of narrative movement into the past attest to a common conception of the known and the knowable in communication and in time. For it is through the medium of the chain of oral performances that traditional lore reenacts and thus perpetuates itself within an oral world.

Ključne riječi

Hrčak ID:

66011

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/66011

Datum izdavanja:

15.3.1989.

Podaci na drugim jezicima: hrvatski

Posjeta: 2.112 *