Practice question · True or false
For roughly ninety-five per cent of the time humans have had language, there was no writing.
Hints
- Compare the age of language with the age of writing systems.
- About 100,000 years against about 5,000.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Language runs to something like 100,000 years and writing to about 5,000, so writing occupies around five per cent of the span. Literature is overwhelmingly an oral phenomenon by duration, and the written tradition is the recent, well-lit end of it.
Practise Literary Study Among the Disciplines
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Literary Study Among the Disciplines
- Eagleton argues literature is a functional rather than an ontological category. What follows from that claim?
- Sort each claim by whether it belongs to the OLD sense of "literature" (learning in general) or the MODERN…
- Complete the account of the category.
- Arrange the media of literary transmission in historical order.
- Milman Parry argued that Homeric epithets such as "swift-footed Achilles" are metrical building blocks. If a…
- Match each writer to the argument they made about the category of literature.
- Raymond Williams shows that the modern sense of 'literature' narrowed to imaginative art around 1800. What…
- Print culture made the author's name more commercially important than manuscript culture had.