Oral Interpretation, Part 5
Question 1: Discuss oral history in performance.
Answer 1: Because it is a serious source of scholarly information, it sounds strange to speak of oral history as performance. However, in the broad sense of the word “performance,” meaning any presentation involving speech and other forms of communication to an audience, it is clear that oral history fits the definition. Indeed, oral history is an important supplement to written history because information can be conveyed through the speaker’s tone of voice and vocal mannerisms that cannot be expressed through printed language. Oral historians make a point of emphasizing those aspects of vocal performance that differentiate oral history from other forms of record-keeping.
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Question 2: Discuss the following principles of a text: theme and mood.
Answer 2: To present an effective oral interpretation of a piece of literature, one must be able to discern the predominant theme and mood of the work.To discover the theme, one must read the text in its entirety and consider the general point the author is trying to get across. Even if the selection to be interpreted is only a portion of the entire work, one needs to understand how the selection fits into the work as a whole. This comprehensive reading should also reveal the mood of the piece. The mood is essentially the emotional content of the text. Naturally, the predominant mood of the text will have an enormous impact on the interpretation. Note that the mood of a text can change numerous times during the course of a selection.
Question 3: Discuss the following principle of a text: characterization.
Answer 3: When interpreting a work of literature, one is often required to assume the point of view of a character in the text. To do this effectively, or to provide appropriate emotional emphasis in the portrayal of a given character, one needs to pay special attention to the author’s use of characterization. Characterization is simply the way the author describes a character. Characterization may be direct, as in descriptions of the character’s appearance and personality, or it may be indirect, in which character is revealed through actions or the ways in which other characters react to a given character. It is important not to take whatever a character says about himself or herself at face value because authors often create “unreliable narrators,” or characters whose words are not necessarily to be trusted.
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