From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Studies

by Ashe,Bertram D.

• ISBN13: 9780415939546
• ISBN10: 0415939542
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-06-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale"-an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener-with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late 20th century. This is the first scholarly book to examine black storytelling as from the frame-tale perspective. The book treats several types of frame texts: short stories as well as novel-length tales; tales that are embedded early in a novel that are referred to later; and tales that appear to have a teller but have no apparent listener.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
``A little personal attention'': Storytelling and the Black Audience in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman	9	(20)
``Ah don't mean to bother wid tellin' `em nothin''': Zora Neale Hurston's Critique of the Storytelling Aesthetic in Their Eyes There Watching God	29	(18)
Listening to the Blues: Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode in Invisible Man	47	(14)
The Best ``Possible Returns'': Storytelling and Gender Relations in James Alan McPherson's ``The Story of a Scar''	61	(16)
From Within the Frame: Narrative Negotiations with the Black Aesthetic in Toni Cade Bambara's ``My Man Bovanne''	77	(16)
``Would she have believed any of it?'': Interrogating the Storytelling Motive in John Edgar Wideman's ``Doc's Story''	93	(16)
Notes	109	(24)
Bibliography	133	(10)
Index	143