THE ORAL IN THE WRITTEN

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THE ORAL IN THE WRITTEN

Abstract:

THE ORAL IN THE WRITTEN: A STUDY OF ORALITY IN SELECTED WEST AFRICAN SHORT STORIES. There has been no sustained study of the fusion of the techniques of African oral narratives and of modern literature. The short story genre has been the chief victim of this neglect. Occasionally, one sees a critic who, in studying the African novel, points out what it borrows from traditional oral narratives but this is hardly extended to cover the form of the short story . The modern African writer’s background as a “cultural hybrid”, means that he is a man of two worlds. Born and reared in an inherited oral culture and through formal education, imbibed the cultural apparatus of the West. In attempting to write, he realizes that he could fuse narrative traditions from the two cultures and thus come up with a uniquely blended art form. It is this processs of fusion as it obtains in the West African short story that concerns us here. In other words, we are examining how selected West African short story writers have fused their indigenous oral narrative techniques into the fabric of an inherited Western narrative form for the purpose of expressing peculiar African experiences. The presupposition is that the West African writer of short stories relies on elements from two literary traditions. Precisely the nature and degree of this welding and how it produced new short stories in West Africa is also the concern of this study. The study consists of five chapters. The first chapter surveys the short story and its origins in both the worlds of Europe and of Africa. The history of writing in Africa which is closely related to the advent of colonialism and missionaries is also examined. Chapter two looks into the definitions of folklore, significance of orature, the impact of the missionaries and how the oral finds itself in the world of the print. Chapter three is a textual analysis of five oral based short stories – ‘the complete Gentleman; ‘Sarzan’; ‘A child in the Bush of Ghost’; ‘The Pot of Gold; and finally ‘the Eyes of The Statue’, written by Amos Tutuola (Nigeria), Birago Diop (Senegal), Olympe Bhely – Quenun (Benin Republic), Mohammedul Nuktarl (Muritania) and Camara Laye, (Guinea) respectively. A textual analysis is then carried out for the four Western based short stories in chapter Four, namely ‘Black Girl1 and ‘Tribal Marks’ by Sembene Ousmane (Senegal), ‘Two sisters’ by Ama Ata Aido (Ghana) and ‘The Truly Married Woman1 by Abioseh Nicol, (Sirra-leone). The final chapter is the conclusion of the study.

THE ORAL IN THE WRITTEN

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