Oral Interpretation

Timothy Gura, Benjamin Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351611329
• Edition: 13
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

In its 13th Edition, the iconic Oral Interpretation continues to prepare students to analyze and perform literature through an accessible, step-by-step process. New selections join classic favorites, and chapters devoted to specific genres—narrative, poetry, group performance, and more—explore the unique challenges of each form. Now tighter and more focused than its predecessors, this edition highlights movements in contemporary culture—especially the contributions of social media to current communication. New writings offer advice and strategies for maximizing body and voice in performance, and enhanced devices guide novices in performance preparation.

Part I

Basic Principles

Olga Tropinina/shutterstock.com

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

W. H. Auden,
“Leap Before You Look”

1 A Beginning and an End A Beginning and an End

Interpretation is the art of communicating to an audience a work of literary art in its intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic entirety.

Expect This

BY THE END OF THIS CHAPTER YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO:

• ► Explain the relationship between art and communication.
• ► Cite several different kinds of performance you encounter in daily life.
• ► Provide several different examples of texts you encounter in daily life.
• ► Assess the means by which interpreters communicate with audiences.
• ► Define the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic components of a literary work.
• ► Provide at least two reasons for performing literature.
• ► Describe three touchstones for selecting literature to perform.
• ► Show how universality, individuality, and suggestion operate (or fail to operate) in a poem or a story.
• ► Select a work of literature to analyze, rehearse, and perform.

█ Interpretation Requires Communicating

Interpretation is the art of communicating to an audience a work of literary art in its intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic entirety. This chapter explains each of the highlighted terms in this definition. In addition, we explore and expand the means of some terms you already know. First we look at “performance” and then we look at “text.”

Performance

Art implies skill in performance. No sooner have we used the word performance—and suggested the study of it—than a constellation of allied concerns and interlocking interests emerges. Performance means different but related things in different contexts. Actors and actresses and singers give performances, of course. We speak of how we performed on a test, how a car performs after a tune-up, and how well a friend performs under pressure. In class you take notes, raise your hand to ask a question, sit quietly while a bore drones on and on, turn in papers on the due date: in short, you perform as a student. When you and your romantic partner are together in front of the fire on a snowy evening, you practice a different set of performance behaviors (we hope!). When you’re at work, your performance comprises still other actions, language, gestures, and manners.

You can say, then, that each day as we go about encountering all the experiences that make up living in the twenty-first century we are “performing” life. We encounter myriad sources of meaning—and we will discuss texts in just a moment—and respond to each of them as who we are. We interpret people and words and signs and music and the tumult or quiet of a given moment in terms of what makes us “tick” and in terms of our relationships with others. Interpreting these encounters—or performing these texts—we simultaneously shape and understand our relations to other people and their unique experiences—what makes them “tick.” Watching, seeing, knowing others becomes the foundation of our ability to perform any text. It helps us understand how everything in the world is not simply about ME. The suggestions in this book will help you to explore how individuals of very different backgrounds confront various kinds of texts. Best of all, your unique responses embody and evoke your own individual view of the world—which explains what you will discover very soon: Emily’s performance of a poem differs so strikingly from Peter’s performance of the same poem. Noting all these differences can lead to those performance choices that can most fully incorporate and convey our diverse experiences.

Does this seem like we somehow wandered into a foreign place? Rest assured, we are looking at life as we are living it. We are recording life’s splendid variety in order to be able to share our responses to it with others. This process of showing our unique view of the world we inhabit displays our own views (of course), but also enables our audience to capture “a sense of the other”—a most decidedly humane endeavor.

In this book we spend most of our time on the performance of literature. We don’t suggest that this is the only performance useful or desirable for study. On the contrary, we refer often to other kinds of performances—performance art, performance as argument, political performance, hip/hop or ethnographic performance, and storytelling—as we discuss the skills you’ll need and will acquire for the performance of literature. With the help of anthropologists, social scientists, and communications specialists, we can view performance from a number of different perspectives. We can observe how other cultures value and exploit performance in important rituals. We can watch how our families enact their own unique rituals (Thanksgiving dinner, say, or important birthdays and anniversaries) with the care of a performance. We can analyze the performance of everyday conversation and note how carefully we pause to search for a word when we want to avoid offending a significant other. These studies of performance hone our observational skills and make us more aware of the strategies authors use to make their texts “like life” (or they show how far other texts oppose accepted patterns). From just such opportunities the entire field of performance studies emerged, and we encourage you to consider pursuing those avenues you find most interesting.

Performing literature alerts us in new and vital ways to the kinds of performance that surround our daily lives. We also think it enriches the way we study the other kinds of performance. After all, you watch the U.S. Open differently if you’ve tried to play tennis, you taste food differently if you’ve also tried cooking, and you probably see an object differently when you’ve seriously tried to sketch, draw, or paint it. We perform literature because it changes the literature for us. In the process, it changes us.

Every art requires discipline and training in the use of the appropriate tools. The writer of a literary selection is a creative artist who orders ideas, words, sounds, and rhythms into a particular form, putting them into written symbols that make a text.

The interpreter, in turn, brings personal experience and insight to bear on the printed symbols and assumes the responsibility of re-creating this written text into a new “text”: the performance. This process demands interaction, thorough analysis, painstaking rehearsal, and strict discipline in the use of voice and body.

Text

You may have been puzzled for a moment when we referred to the performance as a “text.” For many scholars today, text does not simply refer to words or symbols printed on a page, but rather to any “site of meaning,” or to anything that conveys meaning to a viewer or a reader. Thus, songs are texts; paintings are texts; a billboard, some graffiti, a dance—each conveys meaning and thus each is a text. In fact, we need to be alert to all kinds of texts as they occur in our lives. We need to know how we respond differently to each one. You react to a hug from a close friend differently than you do to a wave across campus from a casual friend. Yet each encounter (or text) enriches our relationship with the other. And you already know how texts provoke judgments in us. Is there a newscaster or politician or sports commentator whose voice annoys you so much you have difficulty “hearing” what he or she says? Are you so infatuated with some actors or actresses that you overlook any inadequacies in their performances because they look “so fine”? In short, we respond expansively to some images or events or words on a page—and just miss or skip others. These charged moments of encounter can make us more aware of our place in the world, who we are, how we feel, and how we relate to others. Most often in this book text refers to words ordered and printed on a page, and we use text (in italics) when we want to convey the larger relationship between words and other signs and symbols of meaning.

Like it or not, just like the maker of any “text”, you, the interpreter, are also a creative artist. You select and respond to a meaningful example of literary art you choose to share with your audience. From the moment you appear in front of your audience, through whatever you evoke and embody, you create a new work that aspires to art. It obviously owes much to the author, but it would not exist without your creative act as the interpreter.

The truest and finest art can be disarming because it seems so simple. The audience sees only the result, not all the work you put in to obtain the result. Technical display is not art. We may be exhilarated by the technical proficiency of a pianist who presents the notes of the music with awesome facility and accuracy. However, just as music is more than a sequence of notes, literature is more than a string of words. Art requires the systematic application of knowledge and skill to achieve a desired result. In your case, communication includes communion, the sharing of an experience, first with the work performed and then with an audience.

If an audience says “What a beautiful voice!” or “What graceful gestures!” the interpreter has failed. When the audience’s attention is held by the impact of the text presented, the interpreter has succeeded. Your effectiveness is the result of a preparation so thorough and a technique so perfectly coordinated that the audience cannot see the wheels go around. Great art only looks simple.

█ Interpretation Engages an Audience

… communicating to an audience . . . Perhaps you have already completed other courses in other aspects of communication: public speaking, interpersonal communication, small-group or family communication. What you learned in those courses about conveying messages to audiences will help you here. And the presentational skills you honed in those courses—sufficient volume, clarity of diction, control of pitch and rate, for example—will be used in every class of this course. And if you have studied how the medium affects the message, you will already recognize that the interpreter transforms texts in the act of performance. Doubtless, as your study progresses, you will find many other similarities to the communication studies you have already completed, and you will be able to compare your responsibilities in, say, a public-speaking assignment with your responsibilities as an interpreter.

Given today’s technology, an audience may range from one person to several million. No matter what the size or nature of the audience, your responsibilities as an interpreter are the same. You should communicate as skillfully as possible the text you have selected and your response to it, making intelligent use of every detail to achieve the organic whole. The listeners’ understanding, their mental and emotional responses to the content and to the form in which it is presented, depends to a large degree on your ability to discover these elements and project them satisfactorily in their proper relationship.

How do you communicate these elements to the audience? You use your voice and body in conjunction with an alert and informed mind. Interpreters train their voices and bodies to respond to the particular requirements of a work of literature. Eliminate anything that may distract the audience from experiencing the text. Stay aware of the effect of posture, muscle tone, and general platform presence, and then try to devise physical action that aids communication without calling attention to itself. Interpreters work with their voices during rehearsal so that they may be heard and understood. They need flexibility in range, force, stress, and volume if they are to bring out whatever that author has achieved through the sounds and relationships of the words. If you concentrate on communicating the material, you are l...