English: Oral Interpretation

Oral Interpretation. Performance of Literature

I have several aims for working with the oral interpretation of literature in the classroom. One aim is that when the students are processing, with body and voice, the written word, this will activate an essential process of recognizing language and meaning for the interpreter as well as for the listeners. By listening we come to realize how much we already know about our possibilities in language and about our personal reading strategies. Another aim is to make room for and offer the class the means for the kinds of social engagement which working together with voices and feelings expressed in the art work(s) can give, to meet the other in the text and to be confronted with the interpretation(s) of the other. Then, at that point, we will be confronted with our own interpretation.

A very important aim and issue for me is to propose literary teaching that "qualifies" the classroom dialogue: The class is not supposed to guess at and try out the teacher’s interpretation, or get it “right”, as too many literary discussions seem to strive for. Instead we need to give our students the self-confidence and skills to formulate appropriate questions to the text, to negotiate concrete hypotheses, and seek exact evidence in the text to argue for their interpretation. We need a dialogue that opens up the collaborative research of the text and make way for a large spectrum of methods and questions.

One way of doing this is to guide the students toward a phenomenological approach for description – by asking them what can we observe? A reading aloud, a performance, exposes more of the great spectrum of possibilities that we have in language and interaction and it strengthens our consciousness of the language material. This is a way to gain consciousness of our language, written or spoken, in everyday life as well.

The text in our body – the shaped experience

When we inhabit the text, i.e., ”lend” our body and voice to the text, we have to do it with engagement and seriousness. My experiences with oral interpretations in the classroom are that we naturally get engaged and that seriousness comes with ritualizing good manners, high expectations and subject related, qualified response. When we see our friend or colleague stand up in a soundless room and make an effort to give a literary work its qualified postures, we want to make an effort to demonstrate that we are listening actively and paying attention and paying respect to the difficult task the interpreter performs.

My suggestions for lessons for oral interpretation are quite ritualized, everyone knows what happens next, how to do it, what to listen for first, what to respond to afterwards etc. So the performer can be confident that we do not listen for mistakes or errors, we do not laugh at him or her, we only laugh with him or her if anything unforeseen or funny should happen. The response from the class and the discussions that follows - the imitations of sounds, prosody, pauses and meanings - are strictly technical and subject-related, not personal. The subject is language, expressive mimic and gestures, prosody, literary analysis and methods for analysis, situated study of feelings and experiences expressed in the work.

Investigations of the narrator

What also comes naturally in class'-discussion is, without doubt, the careful research of the narrator. Who (or what) is talking, what are the feelings and intentions of the voice that the performer seeks? In this discussion the students do not settle for descriptions like "third person" or "indirect speech". They realise, for instance, that the voice and narrator’s perspective are not necessarily the same; you can find them in the midst of recent literary discussions of Focalisation (see Gérard Genette: Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell University Press 1980), Multiperson Narration (see Brian Richardson: Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. The Ohio State University Press. 2006) and unreliability but not necessarily knowing or using these terms.

To know who or what is speaking in the text we also have to look for details that elucidate the work’s contemporary connections, literary history and the author. We also need to find out what to do with them, how to perform an old voice in modern time with many sorrows and regrets as well as how to perform a young voice in ancient time with life experiences that sound very much like the ones the students have themselves. The fact is, while dealing with fiction and scenes and creating sound and utterances, the academic level of the investigations in the classroom is often very high. It shows how much we already know about language, art and fictional constructs - stored and matured as experience and language competence.