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Utterance unmoored: The changing interpretation of the act of writing in the European Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Jeffrey Kittay
Jeffrey Kittay
Affiliation:
Department of French and Italian, New York University
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Abstract

Work in the ethnography of communication has barely begun to look at writing, despite the fact that the status of writing bas recently preoccupied much of literary theory. The search to locate how writing functions among a culture's communicative practices can involve identifying domains that are unique to it, for example, where some kinds of writing attain a standing such that they are not meant to be understood as the transcription of a testimony or other oral act. Such a possibility is part of our culture but not part of many others, and is, among other things, a significant cognitive development. This article takes a diachronic perspective, back to a moment in our own past when a certain class of writings began to demand a kind of understanding different from that demanded by writing in that culture up to that time. I look at the Middle Ages to examine, inter alia, the written document putting into question prevailing temporal indices; the move of the act of writing away from an identification with other constatable acts and toward a more oblique and less committed relation to those acts; biblical exegesis as elaborating a new stance of writing through its practice of written gloss; the teaching of writing skills and the professionalization of the writer; and the significance of a renewed use of the cursive hand. The changing status of writing both encouraged and is implicated in the appearance and legitimizing of a set of utterances (and the acts behind them) seen as beneficially unmoored rather than moored, in a space and time of their own. (Ethnography of communication, grammatology, medieval studies, writing)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 209 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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