Unit information: Voices of the People in 2017/18

Unit name	Voices of the People
Unit code	HISTM0073
Credit points	20
Level of study	M/7
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12)
Unit director	Dr. Will Pooley
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None.
Co-requisites	None.
School/department	Department of History (Historical Studies)
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

Speech is central to everyday life, yet fleeting in the historical record. All societies have oral cultures, but how can historians find out about them? Before the invention of writing, and sound and video recording, historians depend on fragmentary records of the voices of the people.

This course invites students to think about the meanings and functions of storytelling, singing, and other ways of speaking in examples from the ancient world to the twenty-first century. Why and how were some words remembered? How important was the oral tradition at different times in history? How do historians treat speech differently to written text? Should historians seek ‘authentic’ speech, and how do they decide what is ‘fake’?

The course will look at examples from more recent oral history, such as the Mass Observation project in the UK and the National Writer’s Project in the US, as well as older examples of oral cultures, such as fairy tales in early-modern Europe, and ancient epics.

Intended Learning Outcomes

1. To give students a broad grounding in how oral culture has functioned in societies over time
2. To improve students’ ability to argue effectively and at length (including an ability to cope with complexities and to describe and deploy these effectively).
3. To be able to display high level skills in selecting, applying, interpreting and organising information, including evidence of a high level of bibliographical control.
4. To develop the ability of students to evaluate and/or challenge current scholarly thinking.
5. To foster student’s capacity to take a critical stance towards scholarly processes involved in arriving at historical knowledge and/or relevant secondary literature.
6. To be able to demonstrate an understanding of concepts and an ability to conceptualise.
7. To develop students’ capacity for independent research.

Teaching Information

1 x two-hour interactive lecture per week.

Assessment Information

One 5,000 word essay (100%) – ILO’s 1-7

Reading and References

Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960).

Robert Perks & Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, 2nd edition (2006).

Donald Ritchie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (2011).

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988).

Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (1988).