Author: Johnstone, Christopher Lyle
Title: Communicating in classical contexts : the centrality of delivery
Review/Collection: "Quarterly Journal of Speech", 87, (2)
Year edition: 2001
Pages: 121-143
Keywords: Éloquence - Eloquenza - Eloquence
Description: The contemporary aversion to or disinterest in orality, performance, and delivery in the study of rhetoric and public address ignores the centrality of these elements in the history and prehistory of the discipline. This oversight is particularly puzzling when we consider scholarly examination of the origins and early development of rhetoric in Greece. While various studies of the Older Sophists seek to reconstruct their doctrines and teachings, none makes clear that at least some of these teachers of the speaker's art must have recognized the importance of delivery‐especially the importance of using the voice to exploit the sounds and rhythms of words and the acoustical features of the physical settings in which oratory was performed. Fragmentary textual evidence prior to Aristotle's Rhetoric suggests that some of the Older Sophists‐most conspicuously Thrasymachus, Antiphon, and Gorgias‐must have been interested in delivery and may have given some instruction in it. Archaeological evidence concerning 5th‐century Athenian speaking settings is even more suggestive, and it permits us to infer several things about the kind of vocal training that these teachers probably provided. [Author]
Author initials: Johnstone 2001
Title: Communicating in classical contexts : the centrality of delivery
Review/Collection: "Quarterly Journal of Speech", 87, (2)
Year edition: 2001
Pages: 121-143
Keywords: Éloquence - Eloquenza - Eloquence
Description: The contemporary aversion to or disinterest in orality, performance, and delivery in the study of rhetoric and public address ignores the centrality of these elements in the history and prehistory of the discipline. This oversight is particularly puzzling when we consider scholarly examination of the origins and early development of rhetoric in Greece. While various studies of the Older Sophists seek to reconstruct their doctrines and teachings, none makes clear that at least some of these teachers of the speaker's art must have recognized the importance of delivery‐especially the importance of using the voice to exploit the sounds and rhythms of words and the acoustical features of the physical settings in which oratory was performed. Fragmentary textual evidence prior to Aristotle's Rhetoric suggests that some of the Older Sophists‐most conspicuously Thrasymachus, Antiphon, and Gorgias‐must have been interested in delivery and may have given some instruction in it. Archaeological evidence concerning 5th‐century Athenian speaking settings is even more suggestive, and it permits us to infer several things about the kind of vocal training that these teachers probably provided. [Author]
Author initials: Johnstone 2001
