Slide 5 of 26
Notes:
Take as another example, this lecture, at which there is, completely implausibly in this day and age, one person speaking and a group listening, as though this were a sermon or an oration. Any of our medieval or Renaissance ancestors would recognize the convention immediately. At the end of the sermon or oration, there will be a question-and-answer period at which the conventions of discourse will change to those of dialogue or disputation, depending on the toughness of the questions, and present an event no less recognizable to our medieval or Renaissance counterparts. Our medieval counterparts would probably be a bit nonplussed by the handouts, particularly the regularity of the writing, but our Renaissance counterparts, if they came late enough, would recognize the hand of the workshop of Mr. Gutenberg and his successors.
