Professor Christopher Johnstone of the department of Communication Arts & Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, will give a lecture, "Oral Communication in Classical Contexts," on Friday, Feb. 4, at 4:10 p.m., in the Red Pit (KJ 109).
Visiting Professor of Communication John Adams describes the lecture as follows:
In the study of rhetoric, the contemporary disinterest in the canon of delivery—speech's mediation through the body and the voice—ignores the centrality of oral communication in the history and prehistory the speaker's art. The earliest teachers of this art—the Sophists of the fifth century BCE—have left fragmentary textual evidence demonstrating an acute awareness of and interest in the aural properties of speech. The sources of this interest in the sounds of speech, and especially in the power of those sounds to move the souls of hearers, are disclosed both in the oral tradition of Greek poetry and in the acoustical properties of the settings in which oratory was performed. This multimedia lecture focuses on the latter of these influences. It illustrates the opportunities and challenges presented to the fifth-century orator, through slides and transparencies that reveal the acoustical properties of ancient settings for oratorical performance.
