Theorizing Orality and Performance in Literary Anecdote and History: Boswell's Diaries

Abstract

The diaries of the eighteenth-century literary figure James Boswell supply a rich source of materials useful not only for delving into period songs and their role in daily life, but also for interrogating our theoretical framework for reading such materials. Boswell's renderings of popular singing and song culture in the course of his activities--literary, political, amorous, familial, domestic, traveling, business, leisure--demonstrate in example after example the mixing of oral and written, of belles lettres and popular culture, in the life and discursive self-fashioning of one lively eighteenth-century gentleman. Recent theoretical framings propose that we rethink those assumptions and inclinations in the study of songs and oral performance that have often inclined to separate the oral and orality from literature and the literary. Such a conceptual division skirts the truly interpolated character of expressive modes, especially those that are customary and quotidian. In addition, the study of cultural expression came into being with a history of conceptualizing "folk" music in terms of misleading notions of a "purer" oral culture, in contrast to a less "authentic" realm of literacy, print, and media-infused popular culture. A further tendency in some studies of orality has at times been a focus on the present with a lack of historical depth in analysis, which gives less access to understanding the oral dimension of the arts and experience of the past. The anecdotes that Boswell recorded prompt us to take up newer models and tools for analysis as we explore his detailed panorama of oral contexts, informal musical performance, and collective cultural reference and experience in eighteenth-century Britain.

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