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Eric Havelock’s Preface To Plato is a book I’d come across often: McLuhan frequently cites it, as does Walter Ong in Orality & Literacy. Well just before Xmas I got round to reading it, and I’ve just re-read it this week. I have been deeply impressed by the book because of its wealth of ideas, its deep sense of scholarship, and because it is so well written: for a book on such a relatively obscure and ancient subject it is a surprisingly good read. Despite being an overtly academic text it manages to provoke a deep sense of wonder about ancient Greek culture, and offers a tantalizing glimpse of the unfathomable alien-ness of their ways of thinking.

The book begins by asking why Plato makes such a sustained and vehement attack on poetry in The Republic. Havelock suggests it is because ‘poetry’ for the Greeks at that time—around 360 BC—bears almost no relation to the rather ephemeral art form we now know, but was an “encyclopedic” repository for the culture’s storehouse of knowledge. It was central to the preservation of the culture’s history, traditions, belief systems, social mores, and technology. It was as important didactically as it was for entertainment.

Because this culture was primarily an oral culture, memorization was achieved through repetition. This is because sound is an ephemeral medium where each utterance disappears the moment it has ceased, and it is only through ritualistic and incessant repetition that information can be maintained in the group consciousness. This creates a hypnotic, trance-like, mental state that Havelock likens to indoctrination, where “the task of education could be described as putting the whole community into a formulaic state of mind”. It was this that Plato was railing against.

Havelock’s argument is that Plato represented a new type of man: the literate man. Literacy allowed information to be stored externally. This “preserved knowledge” broke the spell over the hypnotized oral culture and allowed new means of expression, categorization, abstract thought, and the creation of ’subject’ and ‘object’. That is, rationalism, and the “supreme music” of philosophy. Havelock goes on to say that Plato, and later Aristotle:

… created ‘knowledge’ as an object and as the proper content of an educational system, divided into the areas of ethics, politics, psychology, physics, and metaphysics. Man’s experience of his society, of himself and of his environment was now given separate organised existence in the abstract word.

 
This then is the conceptual core of Preface To Plato. It’s a marvelous book. Along the way there’s lots of good stuff about narrative, performance, the relation of performers to their audience, and plenty of interesting textual analysis of The Iliad.

However, although I do basically agree with Havelock’s position, I think he has overstated the influence and importance of epic poetry as an oral culture’s means of storing knowledge (which in this particular context means overstating the importance of Homer). There are certainly other ways of remembering things without writing—images, song, ritual, plays, sculpture, and story, for example. This criticism is borne out by critics such as Halverson.

Nonetheless, wholeheartedly recommended.

References
Halverson, J. (1992) ‘Havelock on Greek Orality and Literacy’ in the Journal of The History of Ideas.
Havelock, E. (1963) Preface To Plato. Cambridge, London: Belknap Press.
Ong, W. (2002) Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.

I was recently involved in an online workshop sponsored by Kaleidoscope’s SIG on Narrative Learning Environments. As part of this we looked at number of proprietary NLEs and this one really caught my eye.

POGO is a “distributed learning environment” (Fusai et al 2003) developed by the Universities of Siena and Liege, Phillips Design, Ravensburger Interactive Media, and the Domus Academy. There are two things that particularly interest me. Firstly, the designers have specifically used narrative as a pedagogical underpinning for the system, and seem to have developed their theoretical model from both observation of children’s story-telling activities and from the literature (Papert and Bruner in particular). Secondly, they’ve completely rethought the computer interface: there’s no point in my describing the system in words, just watch the video:

Really, really interesting. If you want more, there’s a paper describing the development and design of the system referenced below. However, note that the video dates from 2001 and the paper from 2003, and we should perhaps ask ourselves what has become of POGO. Is anyone using it? Can you buy it? Googling suggests not…

Shame. Love that Mumbo!
Ciao.

Reference
Fusai, C., Saudelli, B., Marti, P., Decortis, S. & Rizzo, A. (2003) Media Composition and Narrative Performance at School. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 19, 177-185.

One of my main interests these days is narrative: specifically, I am half way through a PhD entitled Narrative Structures In e-Learning, and I teach narrative as part of a Contextual Studies module on the BA (Hons) Interactive Digital Media course at Swansea Metropolitan University.

The problem with studying narrative is that it is an “overloaded” concept (Dettori & Giannetti 2006). Since the so-called “narrative turn” of the early 1980s there has been an explosion of interest in narrative, and untold books and papers have been published in disciplines as diverse as Management and Organizational Studies, Anthropology, Gender Studies, Medicine, History, Psychoanalysis, Art, Multimedia (particularly Virtual Reality environments), Museum Studies, Sociology, Literary Theory, Law, Cultural Studies, Education, and New Media Theory. It is an important topic in both Discourse Analysis and Semiotics.

The problem is that the different disciplines often define narrative in different ways, even when using the same basic terminology. What’s more, these definitions often defy everyday usage: most people use the terms ’story’ and ‘narrative’ interchangeably, for example, whereas to a narrative theorist the distinction between the two is vital. Even in cases where a basic functional model of narrative can be agreed upon, terminology varies: ’story’ becomes fabula or histoire, the ‘narrative discourse’ becomes sjuzet or récit or discours, and even a seemingly straightforward and widely-used term such as ‘plot’ becomes problematic.

Another huge issue is that much of the literature on narrative is reflexive, that is, concerned with narratives in literature (and particularly the novel). It is only since the publication of pioneering work by Labov & Waletzky on oral narratives that attention has turned to its role in everyday speech. This is kind of strange, because it seems obvious that thought and speech necessarily predate writing. As Ong puts it, oral expression is our primary modeling system, written or otherwise textualized expression our secondary modeling system. Consequently, a lot of my own research has been focused on looking at narrative as a function of the brain, as a mode of thought, as the primary means of human expression, and therefore as a cultural artefact crucial in the formation of both personality and culture in general.

Of course, it is precisely because it is so fundamental to human thought and expression that this multi-disciplinary research into narrative is going on in the first place: narrative is what Herman has called a “domain-general” cognitive tool. It’s everywhere, everyday, for everyone. As Brooks says, we’re immersed in it.

For those wishing to investigate this fascinating topic a little further, here’s my Introduction To Narrative (96k .pdf file).

References
Brooks, P. (1984) Reading For The Plot. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Dettori, G. & Giannetti, T. (2006) A Concise Introduction to Narrative Learning Environments. Course material, VDS Workshop on Narrative Learning Enviroments. From http://nle.noe-kaleidoscope.org/

Herman, D. (2003) Stories as a Tool for Thinking, in Herman, D. (Ed) Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Labov, W. & Waletzky, J. (1967, 1997) Narrative Analysis: Oral Version of Personal Experience, in Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7 (1-4), 3-38. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ong, Walter J. (1982) Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen & Co