timelets

"In The Invention of Literature (1999), the classical scholar Florence Dupont reminds us that many of the greatest works of human imagination were created to be performed, to be heard.

Before the printing press and mass literacy, the written versions existed as blueprints or records of performances, recitals, speeches, songs, and other forms of oral communication. Voicing was an art of living creators, and the voice of the storyteller was polyphonous; the stories created were all different and the same at one and the same time—again the fairy tale as tune, riffed by singers or instrumentalists. Every listener is potentially a new storyteller. Early literature was not composed of fixed texts, but of play scripts and prompt books, storytellers’ scrolls, pattern books. ”

-- Warner, Marina;. “Once upon a Time.”