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Intermediality of oral communication in the early modern world
| Focussing on oral means for creating publicity, this paper will argue that oral communication in developed early modern societies can only be studied succesfully if the intermediality of the oral spheres is taken into account. Using notions and insights from communication studies (the notion of the informal public sphere, the two-step-flow principle, spirals of silence and insights on the rhetorical structure of individual opinions), I would like to propose an approach which links orality to visual, theatrical, and literary culture. Such an approach should also help to deal with the obvious problem of historical studies of orality: the ephemerality of the spoken word, and the fact that we can only access the oral modes through written/printed documents and literary, musical, and visual representations.
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