Orality: The Power of the Spoken Word

201 Pages·2004·1.415 MB·English

by  Graham Furniss (auth.)

Orality
The Power of the Spoken Word
Graham Furniss
Orality
Other books by Graham Furniss
POETRY, PROSE AND POPULAR CULTURE IN HAUSA
IDEOLOGY IN PRACTICE: Hausa Poetry as Exposition of Values and Viewpoints
AFRICAN BROADCAST CULTURES: Radio in Transition (co-editor)
POWER, MARGINALITY AND AFRICAN ORAL LITERATURE (co-editor)
AFRICAN LANGUAGES, DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATE (co-editor)
Orality
The Power of the Spoken Word
Graham Furniss
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
© Graham Furniss 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-3404-8
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First published 2004 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-51706-0 ISBN 978-0-230-51011-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230510111
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Furniss,Graham
Orality:the power of the spoken word/Graham Furniss.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Oral communication.I.Title
P95.F87 2004
302.2(cid:2)242—dc22 2004044736
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
For Wendy, Eleanor, Jack and Katie
The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King
Hamlet Act 2, scene ii
Contents
List of Photographs and Figures ix
Acknowledgements x
Preface xi
Introduction: The Power of the Spoken Word 1
Chief Standing Bear and a writ of habeas corpus 4
1 The Oral Communicative Moment 12
Orality as a nervous condition 12
Oral communication as model and ideal 13
On the concern with literacy 15
Power and the spoken word 17
Making the most of the moment 19
The anxiety of the moment: Marshal Mathers 23
Intentionality – the speaker or the text? 25
Memory and the making of the text 27
Making known – the private to the public 27
Mapping intention and effect in the oral
communicative moment: Sir Geoffrey Howe in action 29
Concluding remarks 42
2 Cultural Parameters of Speech: Genre, Form, Aesthetics 43
Attitudes to culture and to language 43
Genres 46
Genre and ways of speaking: the expectations of speaker
and listener 48
Disputing the terms of verbal trade: the case of the northern
Transvaal between the 1920s and 1950s 54
Notions of appropriate language: praising 57
Fixed and changing roles 58
Ambiguity versus clarity 59
Maintaining and disrupting the relation between form
and content 61
Critical discourse about speaking and the aesthetics of speech 64
The aesthetics of speaking: two contrasting cultures 65
Concluding remarks 70
vii
viii Contents
3 Insertion into the Social – Constituting Audiences,
Audience Cultures and Moving from the Private to
the Public 72
Social domains of cultural production: the performance
and the audience 72
The constituting of public culture 76
Audiences and publics 84
Audience cultures 87
Concluding remarks 90
4 Ideology and Orality 92
What ideology? 92
Truth and values 95
Ideology in process: typification and evaluation 100
Evaluative/ethical discourses 102
Evaluative language 110
Alternative discourses: the advertiser’s armoury 112
From ideological process to ideology 117
Stereotypes and the kaleidoscope of human speech and
action 118
Hubert Humphrey and the 1948 Democratic National
Convention 124
Concluding remarks 130
5 Academic Approaches to Orality 131
Orality versus literacy: the Great Divide debate 131
Poetics 141
Rhetoric 144
Pragmatics 149
The ethnography of speaking 153
Performance and political language 158
Concluding remarks 161
6 Concluding: On the Centrality of the Evanescent 164
Appendix A: Sir Geoffrey Howe’s Resignation Statement to the
House of Commons, 13 November 1990 171
Appendix B: Speech by Hubert H. Humphrey to the
Democratic National Convention, July 14, 1948 177
References 180
Index 183
List of Photographs and Figures
Photographs
1 Chief Standing Bear
(courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian Institution) 7
2 Sir Geoffrey Howe
(courtesy of Glenn Ratcliffe) 30
3 Senator Hubert Humphrey
(courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library) 126
Figures
1.1 Pattern of kinetic emphasis (number of emphatic
movements) in the resignation speech by
Sir Geoffrey Howe 35
6.1 The oral communicative moment 168
6.2 Frames and the speech event 168
6.3 Contexts for the speech event and its frames 169
ix