Sign Language Studies

SIGNERS OF TALES: THE CASE FOR LITERARY STATUS OF AN UNWRITTEN LANGUAGE Nancy Frishberg IBM Corporation One of the most frequently cited arguments against granting academic credit for courses in American Sign Language (ASL) continues to be the presumed "lack of literature." Chapin's introduction to this volume gives us two recent cases. My own experience in dealing with curriculum committees in several major universities has given me a chance to confront skeptical colleagues face-to-face. I wish I could report that my successes were universal. In fact, they have been limited. I have managed to aid several graduate students in getting ASL accepted for their foreign language reading or competency requirement. I have helped create additional exceptional cases for undergraduates, like the one cited in Chapin (above). In the interest of affecting attitudes of even more skeptics and aiding colleagues engaged in similar efforts, the following remarks collect the arguments refuting ASL's "lack of literature' and will propose several curricular remedies to improve those sign language courses which suffer from inadequate focus on literary traditions of the deaf. A bit more background may give insight. In the early years of this decade I was invited to participate in a unique curricular partnership. The Theater Department and the Education Department of a local undergraduate program wanted to highlight their strengths together. They asked me to help them make their wellknown children's theater productions accessible to deaf audiences by involving the students enrolled in deaf education, theirs being the only B.A. program in deaf education resulting in state certified teachers in the city. For several years (1982-1985), I taught a course for Marymount Manhattan College (New York, @1988 by Linstok Press, Inc. ISSN 0302-1475 Signers of Tales NY) called "Sign Language and the Performing Arts." I asked that this course be required of students auditioning for roles as student interpreters in the spring children's theater productions. It was my belief then, as now, that students with a limited exposure to sign language should gain a bit of perspective on their place in the literary lives of their audience. The deaf students who would see our productions might never have attended a live theatrical performance before, nor have been exposed to interpreters , but these facts did not mean that their lives up until now had been lacking in structured or traditional forms of performance, nor that they would not be exposed to even more language art in their own language. The deaf adults whom we would invite to attend the performances would come with rich experiences of deaf theater, interpreted performances, and a variety of verbal art forms. The following remarks, then, have grown out of this course, as well as prior reflections on what constitutes a traditional and conventional verbal art form in a language without sound or writing. Defining a literary aesthetic Does a literary tradition depend on a written tradition? This question may be crucial for some who argue against ASL's academic status because of literature. I believe the case can be made by analogy with the greatest traditions in Western and non-Western literature that written forms of language are not required for a community to possess a well-formed aesthetic in poetry, narrative, humor, and rhetoric. Greek and Balkan Epics. Consider, first, the classical Greek Odyssey: it is without question a literary work worthy of study by students of Greek language, and in translation by students of literature. Can we assume that its author wrote the tale down himself, or even that there was a single person called Homer? Albert Lord argues convincingly that Homer "represents all SLS 59 Summer 1988 singers of tales from time immemorial and unrecorded to the present. Each [of whom...] is as much a part of the tradition of oral epic singing as is Homer- (1964:vii). Lord cites the evidence that the epics we know today as classics of ancient Greek literature must have been passed on orally for a long time before being written down, that writing only came to the languages of that part of the world well after the events depicted in the tale would have taken place. Nonetheless, this...