The Writing of Oral History: Studs Terkel's "Working" and "Hard Times".

Abstract

Terkel's books have informed the conceptions of a wide audience about the nature of real talk in written form. This study looks at the written representation of speech events in these books and the process that produced it. The three kinds of texts produced for Terkel's project--tape-recorded interviews, transcripts, and edited excerpts--are compared in the context of what Terkel and his transcriber said about their making. The linguistic features of these texts reflect, in addition to the expressed designs of these makers, a set of conversational and literary conventions that produced some designs of their own. Certain structures of the original dialogues, inhering in the respective roles of the participants and the way their topics were approved, ordered, tied, and shifted, are shown to enable, others to complicate, the transformation of spoken dialogues into written monologues. While Terkel's transcriber gave him admirably faithful texts to work with, she also made several kinds of minor modifications, most of them inadvertent, which show the influence of literary conventions. The recognizable minor discrepancies between what both she and Terkel thought they did, and what their texts show them to have done, provide new evidence for certain kinds of unreflective linguistic processing. In a variety of concrete ways, Terkel's editing reflects the tension between an oral historian's efforts to record faithfully what was said and the efforts on an author to accommodate these messages to the new medium. His practice of staying close to the original texts by relying mainly on deletion, for example, entails certain sacrifices of emphasis, nuance and rhythmic variety. But in general, his selection and alteration of oral interactive features enhances poetic effects in both fine details and larger discourse structures. His editing alters the original proportion and placement of fact and evaluation in both sentences and larger units. Such alteration has ethical and political dimensions concerning the respective roles of oral historians and their respondents as shapers of stories and interpreters of history.