Zhenzhao Nie

Global Literary Leaders: Keynote Speakers

Abstract

Both oral literature and written literature exist by virtue of an underlying text. When classified according to the medium in which a text is embodied, texts can be divided into three categories: brain text, written text, and electronic text. Brain text refers to the memories preserved within the human brain; written text denotes characters or symbols recorded on material substrates; and electronic text comprises binary codes stored via digital devices. Among these three forms, brain text is the primordial source, with written symbols representing its symbolic manifestation and electronic text its digital form. For a long time, scholarship has maintained that before the advent of written symbols, oral literature was not text-mediated but transmitted solely by word of mouth, thereby rendering oral literature a literature devoid of text. However, this traditional dichotomy between oral and written literature obscures the underlying cognitive basis common to all literary forms, for it fails to distinguish between the method of oral transmission and the literary substance itself. In reality, it is not oral literature that is passed on by word of mouth but the brain text preserved in the human mind. Prior to the emergence of written symbols, the earliest literary forms, such as poetry and narrative, were stored in the brain in the form of neural-cognitive structures, thereby constituting brain text. Brain text is a biological text and it embodies the perceptions and cognitions of phenomena as preserved in memory, comprising image-based concepts derived from sensory experiences alongside abstract concepts expressed through linguistic symbols. Thus, oral literature exists through the mediation of brain text. Once written symbols appeared, the recorded versions of oral literature essentially captured the underlying brain text. Without brain text, there would be no literary content to transmit orally, and consequently, oral literature would not exist.

Bio

Professor NIE Zhenzhao FBA MAE is Professor and Yunshan Chair of World Literature and Languages at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Previously he was a Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the university-chartered Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of World Literature at Zhejiang University, where he became Emeritus in 2022. He is currently President of the International Association for Ethical Literary Criticism, and has consistently been designated by Elsevier as a Most Cited Chinese Researcher, as well as appears in both the career-long and single-year categories of Stanford University’s World’s Top 2% Scientists List. He is an International Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea.