This work explores the written representation of African-American spoken-voice storytelling in African American writers from Charles Chesnutt in the late 19th century to Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman of the mid and late 20th century. In examining black storytelling from the frame-tale perspective, the author shows the variety of ways that these writers negotiated the intricate, both intra and extra-textual, relations set up between writer, teller, tale, listener and reader, and provides essential insights into the fundamental role of the audience in the practice of African-American...

Trey Ellis's uproariously funny debut novel Platitudes, first published in 1988, takes on conflicts within the African American literary community. Dewayne Wellington, a failing black experimental novelist, and Isshee Ayam, a radical feminist author, collaborate on Dewayne's latest sexist comedy. Alternately telling the story about the coming of age of Earle and Dorothy-two black middle-class teenagers, sex-starved in New York City-the battling writers sneak ever, and dangerously, closer to reconciling their literary disputes.

This edition of Platitudes also includes "The New Black...

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...