| By the twentieth century, most writers participating in the western print text market had significantly distanced themselves from traditions of oral storytelling. However, the twentieth century saw a reemergence of the oral narrative tradition within mainstream culture.; In one context, we find post colonial writers who are coming out of a strong native oral tradition but still wanting to participate in the print-text market exploring ways to infuse properties of the oral tradition into their print text novels. African writers, for example, have struggled with artistic and national identities that must negotiate an indigenous cultural heritage with the realities of political and cultural colonization. As a result, African writers began merging oral and print traditions by integrating oral narrative elements, like proverbs, antiphony, and most interestingly, music into the print text. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novel, Matigari, represents his innovations well as it reflects the formal structure and musical dynamics of the oral narrative.; Some first and second generation American writers composing on the borderlands of an ancestral and adopted culture have also had to grapple with various print and oral conventions in an effort to represent both ends of the cultures they have inherited. Maxine Hong Kingston's first three novels, China Men, The Woman Warrior, and Tripmaster Monkey, all reflect a symbiotic relationship between music, talk-story, and print text. Kingston plays with myth and music in novel ways to compose a text that reflects a narrative on the borderlands of culture as well as oral and print communication.; A third context for the reemergence of the oral tradition is found in the poetry and prose of the Beat Generation of American writers. Specifically, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac's work can be considered as representative of the creative blending of oral performance compositional forms and procedures with print text formats and conventions. One way Kerouac achieves this is through the jazz-poetry jam forums, where narratives were often improvised and collaboratively composed. Ginsberg's collaborations with musicians like Bob Dylan and Joe Strummer have inspired novel poetry-music forms that show the influence of musical compositions in style and structure. |
