American Studies Commons^™

Analyzing The Mutability Of Oral And Digital Media, Bennett Bowden

Honors Theses

This project takes the analyses of Walter Ong and synthesizes conclusions about the likelihood of different mediums to encourage change in artifacts over time. The mediums explored ar et eh oral and the digital, with two heavily studied works being examined as representatives of each. This study found much higher mutability of artifacts within digital media due to its likelihood to encourage cooperative creative behavior, and further study would be extremely helpful to the field.

Give Me Liberty Or Give Me (Double) Consciousness: Literacy, Orality, Print, And The Cultural Formation Of Black American Identity In Harriet Jacobs’S Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl And Octavia Butler’S Kindred, Aisha Matthews

Third Stone

While literacy may have signified the humanity of male slaves in the antebellum South (at least in their own view), the English language and American print culture did not similarly empower female slaves towards positive subject-formation through discourse. This article will examine the tension between oral culture and print culture in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Ultimately, an analysis of Jacobs’s work through the lens of book history and its power to shape cultural formation will suggest a critical imperative for the contemporary neo-slave narrative genre.

Accordingly, the agency of contemporary …