Oral Culture And Narrative Texts In Eastern Han Dynasty

In many humanities,the study of orality and literacy is plentiful,and some historians got results in the appealing field.This paper is based on existing research,takes Cao E’s story and Zhang Ba’s story as the research objects,explores the process of their formation and change,analyses the oral tradition before they were written,and reveal how the interaction occurred unexpectedly between oral culture and literate culture in these cases.In the text of Cao E’s story during the Han and Tang Dynasty,the change of the storyline occurred in oral transmission,and the most important turning point is that local officials carved select plot on the memorial to Cao E.Local officials offered an authoritative version of Cao E’s story to the masses including illiteracy to dilute the populace’s trust in witchcraft from local cultural tradition and continue to convert locals’ society to patriarchy.So the transmission of Cao E’s story displays the interaction between great tradition and little tradition.The record of Zhang Ba’s political career turned out to be true.His choice represents the mentality and situation of some officials who have received Confucian education and struggled in the actual political condition.The Eastern Han Dynasty relied on documents transmitting to administer the empire but most people were illiterate,which had caused a gap the system of collecting public opinion had failed to bridge between the written world and the oral world.Through these two cases,we can find that oral culture and literate culture have influenced and shaped society,politics and people’s ideas in the Eastern Han Dynasty.