Oral communication is quite different in its spontaneity and communicative power from textual and visual communication. Culturally-bounded expectations of ways of speaking and individual creativity provide the spark that can ignite revolution or calm the soul. This book explores, from a cross-cultural perspective, the centrality of orality in the ideological processes that dominate public discourse, providing a counterbalance to the debates that foreground literacy and the power of written communication.
Autorentext
GRAHAM FURNISS is Professor of African Language Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. He is the author of Poetry, Prose and Popular Culture in Hausa and Co-Editor of African Broadcast Cultures; Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature; and African Languages, Development and the State.
Zusammenfassung
What is it about the magic of the moment, being present when the world turned, that is so important an element in individual and social behaviour? The oral communicative moment brings together ways of speaking and pre-existing relations between speaker and audience in such a way that success or failure can seal fates or unpick impending disaster. Graham Furniss examines the nature of such moments, whether memorable public occasions or moments in the daily flow of human interaction, and situates them in the culturally defined expectations that determine what are, and what are not, appropriate genres of speech for particular kinds of event. He argues for examining the characteristics of orality in the context of contemporary social, political and economic processes as people dicuss, decide, change tack, and become aware of the broader consensus beyond their own personal experience.
Inhalt
Introduction The Oral Communicative Moment Cultural Parameters of Speech: Genre, Form, Aesthetics Insertion into the Social: Constituting Audiences, Audience Cultures and Moving from the Private to the Public Ideology and Orality Academic Approaches to Orality Concluding: On the Centrality of the Evanescent Appendix A: Sir Geoffrey Howe's Resignation Speech, 1990 Appendix B: Hubert Humphrey's Speech to the 1948 Democratic National Convention References Index