Language
The use of language is that of words solely originating from individuals. Anna Deavere Smith interviewed individuals and recorded their words, exactly as said. Smith then transcribed their words onto paper. The culmination of Smith’s work is a series of versed monologues that are able to convey both meaning and feeling. Smith tries to transcribe in a style that keeps all of the words and emotions of their authors intact. When read on paper, the words and sentences are broken up, to give a sense of sound of how they gave their interview. This portrays a sense that each character is in deep thought, excited and rushed, and so on during their interviews. This allowed Smith to emulate the characters' speech patterns and vocal rhythms to try to convey the essence of each character.
Read more about this topic: Fires In The Mirror
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.”
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
“Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints—the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk—we think we’re using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we’re its slavish agents.”
—Harry Mathews (b. 1930)
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)