The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation

by Dennis Tedlock

Dennis Tedlock presents startling new methods for transcribing, translating, and interpreting oral performance that carry wide implications for all areas of the spoken arts. Moreover, he reveals how the categories and concepts of poetics and hermeneutics based in Western literary traditions cannot be carried over in their entirety to the spoken arts of other cultures but require extensive reevaluation.

Genres: Anthropology

376 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1983

About the author

Dennis Ernest Tedlock was the McNulty Professor of English and Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. in 1968 from Tulane University.

Reviews

[Tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agreed with many of the ideas in these essays and found many interesting, but unfortunately the majority of it is too time and/or domain specific. Tedlock hopes the recent introduction of the cassette tape will revolutionize linguistic fieldwork techniques, many of the essays are close readings or critiques of others' close readings of specific Native American oral narratives, and he has an awful lot of bones to pick with linguists in the 70s (not that I don't love decades old drama). Tedlock's overarching theses are that oral storytelling shouldn't be seen as prose but more as dramatic poetry (and therefore needs a performance-oriented transcription method to properly contextualize it) and that most researchers are limited from completely understanding oral narrative because they think in terms of their alphabetic or syllabic writing systems. Basically, a cultural framework shift is needed to properly study the narrative performances of an oral society. So I quite liked Tedlock's approaches and there are some worthwhile ideas here, but most of it was unfortunately too outdated or too domain-specific to be relevant. Oh, but there were footnotes instead of endnotes!

[Ben Haines]

There was possibly a further dimension of divination, less a reading than a ‘seeing’, the divining and pronouncing of a meaning beyond the signs but implicit in them. For a mag-nif i cent example of ‘interpretation’ of such a text, and a lucid discussion of the process of transcription and translation, see Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpret-ation, esp. chapter 4.

From aztecs