This pioneering work, which is based on the author's comparative studies and decades-long fieldwork experience in Africa and Great Britain, offers a unique insight into the multi-modality of language that leads scholars to rethink the fields of language, literature, and performance. It should prove to be of particular value to those interested in the fields of social linguistics, pragmatics, and linguistic anthropology.
After a general introduction in Chapter 1, Finnegan examines the role of language in the development of human history in Chapter 2, highlighting the overlooked non-verbal linguistic elements which can be captured through audio, visual, and multimedia technologies.
Chapters 3–9 focus on genre-specific sections on varying dimensions of language. Based on personal stories recorded in a British town and analyzed in relation to narrative theory and studies of identity, Chapter 3 describes storytelling as an art to express one's view of self as both constructed and experienced through self-narration. Then Finnegan clarifies in Chapter 4 the significance of a performance-based approach to understanding oral expression based on the analysis of three examples taken from British texts and fieldwork: the tale of a snuff-taker, poems of a dub artist, and carols, and proves that linguistic performance and written text are not independent expressive acts, but rather complementary dimensions of verbal art. Chapter 5 addresses the broader perspective of oral language in relation to two directions of Jack Goody's work on the interface between the written and the oral: firstly, the study of differences between oral and literate cultures; secondly, research on the multidimensionality of oral expression drawn from his fieldwork on the oral literature of the Bagre people.
Gravitating towards other art forms, Finnegan then investigates song in Chapter 6 as an often-overlooked art form, the study of which is complicated by cultural differences, language genres, individual artistic differences, and dissimilar performance venues. Therefore, the relative weight or priority of the core aspects of song – words, music, and performance – remains an open question. Chapter 7 presents the author's stance against the distinction between linguistic competence and performance, in favour of an approach that emphasizes the process and context of language use as well as the role of participants and voices in a communicative act. Chapter 8 is devoted to questions concerning the origins of verbal creation itself. Drawing from her comparative analyses of poems, and case studies in which she details and analyzes the content of her personal dreams, Finnegan surmises that human imagination and dreaming may comprise the primal force behind the evolution of human language. Finally, Finnegan returns to the concept of linguistic performance in Chapter 9 – this time, within the context of ‘performance literature’. In her view, a literary performance is not merely an oral event, but a complex and multidimensional artistic event that is influenced by time and space, by the individual participants, and by the chosen artistic medium.
In addition to the contemporary narrow understanding of the role of human communication, this book provides readers with a comprehensive and contextualized vision of language across cultures by questioning the essence of language itself and the importance of cultural context.
