The place of narrative in human affairs: the implications of Hymes's Amerindian work for understanding text and talk
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James Collins
Abstract
Throughout his long career, Dell Hymes studied and wrote about American Indian languages and cultures, and this work has enduring significance for how we think about relations between text and talk. In providing an account of that significance, the article focuses on Hymes's writing about American Indians and narrative, exploring the close interrelations among the two, then discussing his specific contributions to ethnopoetic theory, illustrating these with reference to a Tolowa (Athabaskan) narrative. Because he trenchantly critiqued received assumptions about the relation between speaking and writing, Hymes's ethnopoetic work has implications for ongoing debates about literacy and society, which is discussed at length. I conclude that his narrative scholarship raises but ultimately leaves unsettled fundamental questions about the relation between text and context.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial: Hymes, text and talk
- On Hymes: introduction
- Hymes on speech socialization
- Ethnography and democracy: Hymes's political theory of language
- Breakthrough into action
- From performance to print, and back: Ethnopoetics as social practice in Alice Florendo's corrections to “Raccoon and his Grandmother”
- The place of narrative in human affairs: the implications of Hymes's Amerindian work for understanding text and talk
- Hymes's linguistics and ethnography in education
- Dell Hymes's visions of enquiry
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial: Hymes, text and talk
- On Hymes: introduction
- Hymes on speech socialization
- Ethnography and democracy: Hymes's political theory of language
- Breakthrough into action
- From performance to print, and back: Ethnopoetics as social practice in Alice Florendo's corrections to “Raccoon and his Grandmother”
- The place of narrative in human affairs: the implications of Hymes's Amerindian work for understanding text and talk
- Hymes's linguistics and ethnography in education
- Dell Hymes's visions of enquiry
