The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral TraditionA master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani’s detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub’s striking photographs of her in performance. The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document. |
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... storyteller is to be discovered in her ability to work within the tradition , the imitative part of her art , as she simultaneously gives her audiences new insights into ancient images by using them to give form to their contemporary ...
... storyteller's bounty : they contain the emotional history of the people . With the culture's most deep- ly felt , enduring fears and hopes compressed within them , they have the capacity to elicit strong emotional responses from members ...
... storyteller moves her characters from conflict to resolution ; they are also organized in cyclical forms , pat- terns . These patterns or models are the central theme - generating units of the story . The simplest form of storytelling ...
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
PrologueOrigins | 9 |
Masithathu Zenani on Storytelling | 19 |
Copyright | |
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