The Mission of Voices & Texts

The primary mission of Voices and Texts is to record, share and advance the study of living oral traditions and texts dependent on or variously interacting with oral tradition. All aspects pertaining to orality-literacy studies are welcome: compositional, performative, aesthetic, comparative, philosophical, social, hermeneutical, and many more.

The scholarship represented in Voices and Texts is global, engaging a wide spectrum of the humanities and social sciences, resonating with cultures world-wide, and cutting across national and religious boundaries.

Rethinking cultures of speech and scribally composed texts embedded in an oral biosphere, Voices and Texts seeks to explore assumptions about the verbal arts that are entrenched in typographic modes of thinking.

In sum, the concern of Voices and Texts is not just "oral" versus "literary," but new theories about the verbal arts. Notions concerning text and intertextuality, authorship and tradition, reading and writing, memory and imagination, logic and cognition, rhetoric and sense perception, repetition and originality, and many more, are all affected by the developing scholarship of oral traditional literature.