Articles Tagged with Performance
'Blasts of Language': Changes in Oral Poetics in Britain Since 1965
This article examines how oral performances of poetry have proliferated over the past forty years to become an essential part of the writing and distribution of poetry in the UK. Our analysis of this phenomenon involves historical research and suggests new ways of looking at the construction of poetic meaning. We draw on interviews with practitioners from diverse poetry communities in considering how performance challenges the exclusive emphasis on the silent, printed text in existing histories of English language poetry.
Read more »Carneades’ Quip: Orality, Philosophy, Wit, and the Poetics of Impromptu Quotation
This paper explores the reworking of orally-derived poetry and myth amongst philosophers in the Hellenistic age. The specific topic is a series of poetic quotations that were exchanged between Carneades of Cyrene and one of his pupils. An analysis of this exchange suggests that the aesthetics and communicative power of oral poetics continued to be operative even in the most learned circles of the Hellenistic period and could be invoked to score humorous and sophisticated philosophical points.
Read more »Vocal Performance and Speech Intonation: Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”
This article proposes a linguistic analysis of a recorded performance of a single verse of one of Dylan’s most popular songs—the originally released studio recording of “Like A Rolling Stone”—and describes more specifically the ways in which intonation relates to lyrics and performance. This analysis is used as source material for a close reading of the semantic, affective, and “playful” meanings of the performance, and is compared with some published accounts of the song’s reception. The author has drawn on the linguistic methodology formulated by Michael Halliday, who has found speech intonation (which includes pitch movement, timbre, syllabic rhythm, and loudness) to be an integral part of English grammar and crucial to the transmission of certain kinds of meaning. Speech intonation is a deeply-rooted and powerfully meaningful aspect of human communication. This article argues that is plausible that a system so powerful in speech might have some bearing on the communication of meaning in sung performance.
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