Marcel Jousse's anthropology of mimism is a plea for a change of civilization. Our present-day Western civilization has decomposed the human being into a mind-soul-spirit and a body, put writing as the apex of this human's expression, and set this human as the conqueror of his world. Jousse pleads for a threefold re-composition: a human compound, expressing himself as a whole, and in exchange with a cosmos that he mimes and infuses with consciousness. What is needed is an evolution, neithe...

In this book, first published in 1990, Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker offer the first English translation of Marcel Jousse’s crucially important work, Le style oral. As the translators observe, this study fired the imagination of contemporary intellectuals in Paris soon after its publication and influenced the work of many. In this book, Jousse provides a thorough and detailed theoretical account of the compositional style of oral, as opposed to literate, authors, showing th...