The Power of the Spoken Word: Literature in the American Mass Media of the 1990s by Codrina Cozma A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Richard Wilber, Ph.D. Victor Peppard, Ph.D. Silvio Gaggi, Ph.D. Joseph Moxley, Ph.D. Date of Approval: July 8, 2005 Keywords: oral literature, mediatized literature, film, book clubs, radio, literary aesthetics © Copyright 2005, Codrina Cozma Dedication This dissertation has been made possible through the constant financial and emotional support of Ms. Vera E. Wood, who has been not only my sponsor throughout my doctoral studies, but has stood beside me as a wonderful friend and counselor since 1997 when we met in a small church in Kingston, NY. Ms. Wood’s presence in my life proves that God still performs miracles in the lives of those He loves. For all Ms. Wood’s love and generosity, this doctoral degree is hers as much as it is mine. Acknowledgments I would like to extend my gratitude to all the members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Phillip Sipiora, Dr. Joseph Moxley, Dr. Richard Wilber, Dr. Silvio Gaggi, and Dr. Victor Peppard, for their valuable guidance and feedback at various stages of my research. I am also indebted to the USF English Department for supporting my endeavors to grow as a scholar during my doctoral studies here. My thanks also go to my parents, Georgia and Constantin, who have made tremendous sacrifices to support my education. Their love and encouragements have given me the strength to pursue high aims. And so has the support of all my friends to whom I am deeply grateful: to John M. Weeks, for his affection; to Lyda Paulk, Virginia Martin, Linda Simmons, Rhonda Yearwood, and Davida Richardson for lightening up my heart; to Sue Kelly, Annie Barbas, George Bennett, Janet Booth, Dena Gaylor, Mandy Zeitlin, Tammy Mitchell, Roxana Jobson, and the Kings for their faith; to Dzinyo Amekudzi for being my brother and pastor; to Chris Rogers and Marian Ghilea for their true friendship. Table of Contents Abstract ii Introduction: Traditional Orality and Broadcast Media 1 Chapter One: An Overview of the Oral Literature of Ethnic Groups in the United States 30 1.1. The Native American Oral Tradition 30 1.2. The African-American Oral Tradition 39 1.3. The Hispanic-American Oral History 52 1.4. The Asian-American Oral Traditions 55 Chapter Two: Literature in Film, A Postmodern Spectacle 58 2.1. Orality, the Subject of Film 58 2.2. Authorship 64 2.3. The Audience of Oral Literary Products 73 2.4. Narrative and Language in the Camera Oral Discourse 79 Chapter Three: Film Adaptations and the Rites of Oral Literature 97 3.1. Plot 98 3.2. Character Treatment 108 3.3. The Cultural Substance of Adaptations 120 3.3.1. Socio-Political Aspects 120 3.3.2. Eroticism 137 3.3.3. Psychological Issues 143 Chapter Four: The Postmodern Orality Functions of Television and Radio 151 4.1. Television: An Oral Enactment in the Twentieth-Century Global Village 151 4.2. The Television’s Didactic Role: Approaches to Literature-Based Teaching 154 4.3. Book Clubs: From Sewing Bees to the “Oprah-Factor” 164 4.4. Radio Waves and the Tribal Voices of Postmodern Literature 179 Chapter Five: The Mediatized Literature of the Nineties, Art and Dollars 193 Conclusions 241 Works Cited 243 Endnotes 274 About the Author End page i The Power of the Spoken Word: Literature in the American Mass Media of the 1990s Codrina Cozma ABSTRACT The 1990s saw a climax of literature representations in what Ong called the secondary orality, particularly in film, television, and radio; for instance, the film industry produced a number of adaptations of novels that had been accepted into the American literary canon, while television and radio marketed literature through book clubs and literary shows. All these literary productions mediated through film, radio, and television are referred to in this study as mediatized literature. The argument of this dissertation is that 1990s U.S. mediatized literature constitutes a post-modern re-enactment of the traditional oral literature that initially emerged on U.S. territory with pre-literate populations. In support of this thesis, chapter 1 presents the features of the oral traditions of four ethnic groups, while subsequent chapters feature an application of these characteristics, or variations thereof, to literary discourses from film, television, and radio. There is a structural correlation between the oral tradition of the four ethnic groups presented in chapter 1 -- Native-American, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian -- and some of the movie adaptations discussed in chapters 2 and 3 that are based on fiction representing the same ethnic groups (Beloved for the African-American mediatized literature, The Mambo Kings for the Hispanic one, etc.). ii While analyzing the features common to both the oral tradition and the mediatized literature, this study makes use of four variables (authorship, audience, literary product, and literary aesthetics) and of a complex critical apparatus that includes theories of the linguistic sign, the Bakhtinian dialogic system, the Jungian concept of the collective unconsciousness, Bolter’s concept of remediation, etc. Throughout this dissertation, I will argue that, in spite of the Ongian condescension vis-à-vis oral cultural messages as inferior to the written ones, and contrary to Postmanian media apprehensions and Franzenian inertia toward mediatized literature, both oral and mediatized literary messages can be classified as literature, although they may not always follow traditional aesthetic parameters embraced by canonical written literature. Chapter 5 of this dissertation presents some of the major points of the current conversation related to the acceptance of mediatized literature and of the oral tradition into the category of literature and to the complex socio-economic and literary implications of the dissemination of literature through mass media. iii Introduction Traditional Orality and Broadcast Media After an unprecedented expansion of frontiers, whether they be geographical, scientific, or cultural, the end of the twentieth-century witnessed a resurgence of the concept of village, namely that of a global village. The term has often been used in conjunction with notions of international trade and banking, monetary systems, cross-cultural studies, the need for multi-lingual translators versus the internationalizing of English, and perhaps mostly important, in relation with the reality of a compact media network that facilitates a paramount communication system across nations and continents. The global village notion emerged at the end of an era of building urban centers imbued with a Babel-type of individualistic divisions, of pushing the Western frontier further than California and Alaska into the cosmic space, at the end of an era that saw the anxieties and repressions of Freud and the militantism of Martin Luther King. Mankind, exhausted by the competition-dominated city, yearned for a return to a close-knit community, but for the post-modern society, this type of community could not be but global, a global village. Stories have been told in this global village, stories meant to dishevel the chronic loneliness of postmodern individuals and to create the illusion, at least, of a compact community, stories that sometimes manipulated the masses to serve the goals of the global village leaders, stories that defended the communal traditions and values and that kept culture alive. As expected in a village, even a global one, a significant part of these stories were told, re-told, and marketed via oral means. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a group of 1 people escape the 1348 Black Death epidemic by taking refuge in the Italian countryside and telling stories. Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury spend their journey through life telling stories in The Canterbury Tales. Generations of women gathered in sewing circles and quilting bees to invent and reinvent stories since Colonial times up to Modernity. But at the peak of the twentieth-century civilization, five hundred years after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, orality comes back, not to replace Gutenberg’s legacy, but certainly to play a decisive role in the dissemination of culture and art. As Ruth Finnegan asserts, “The idea that the use of writing automatically deals a death blow to oral literary forms has nothing to support it” (Oral Poetry 160). Walter J. Ong makes a clear distinction between what he calls primary orality, the traditional orality of non-literate communities, and secondary orality, the modern technological culture built around oral media such as telephone, radio, and television (11). The 1990s saw a climax of literature representations in what Ong called the secondary orality, particularly in film, television, and radio; for instance, the film industry produced a number of adaptations of novels that had been accepted into the American literary canon, while television and radio marketed literature through book clubs and literary shows. In this study, I will call all these literary productions mediated through film, radio, and television, mediatized literature. The argument of this dissertation is that mediatized literature in the United States in the 1990s constitutes a post-modern re-enactment of the traditional oral literature that initially emerged on U.S. territory with pre-literate populations. To prove this, I will present the features of the oral traditions of four ethnic groups in chapter 1, and I will apply these features, or variations thereof, to literary discourses featured in film (chapters 2 and 3) and 2 television and radio (chapter 4). There is a structural correlation between the oral tradition of the four ethnic groups presented in chapter 1 -- Native-American, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian -- and some of the movie adaptations discussed in chapters 2 and 3 that are based on fiction representing the same ethnic groups (Beloved for the African-American mediatized literature, The Mambo Kings for the Hispanic one, etc.).