SASL Newsletter - Spring 2019 Issue Issue 13 - Spring 2019 | Page 2
SASL Executive Board
2019 – 2022
President
Samuel J. Supalla
University of Arizona
[email protected]
Vice President
(vacant)
Recording Secretary /
Newsletter Editor
Andrew P. J. Byrne
University at Buffalo
[email protected]
Treasurer
Harvey Nathanson
Austin Community College
[email protected]
SASL Journal
Editor-in-Chief
Jody H. Cripps
Clemson University
[email protected]
Members-at-Large
Russell Rosen
CUNY – Staten Island
[email protected]
Gabriel Arellano
Georgetown University
[email protected]
Ron Fenicle
Montgomery College
[email protected]
The Power of ASL
By Andrew P. J. Byrne
What Counts as ASL Literature?
Most of us know the answers to the commonly asked
questions, “Can there be a literature that does not have a
written form?”, “Does ASL have a literature?”, and “If yes,
what is ASL literature?” A question that seems to be rarely
asked is “what constitutes ASL literature?” There appears to
be no one precise answer to this question, however, several
references do address this issue. For example, some of us
place emphasis on the form or the content of a literary work.
Others argue the importance of aesthetics (artistic elements
within a work) or procedural aesthetics (how a storyteller
delivers a work – see Peters, 2000). In this editorial, I will refer
to the respective works of Christopher New, Roman
Jakobson, and Viktor Shklovsky as an attempt to answer the
question of what counts as ASL literature. I will also discuss
two videos to reinforce the guidelines I have used to classify
one as literary and the other as outside the boundaries of ASL
literature.
To understand the difference between literature (i.e.,
ASL) and non-literature, let us begin with Christopher New’s
quote. “Literature is necessarily linguistic; it is distinguished
from painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, etc., by
its use of language. To say that a work is literary is partly to
say that it uses language” (1999, p. 2). With ASL literature, we
can say that it refers to the ASL linguistic elements of
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics,
including “from the smallest units, such as handshape or eye
gaze location, to those on the grammar and the discourse
level” (Bahan, 2006, p. 27). To conclude this point with a
different quote by New, “it is only language in the restricted
sense that is essential to literature” (p. 3). We can claim this
for ASL literature. We are aware of many works that are
signed in a restricted or special way. Among the published
canonical works for ASL literature are the narratives told in
the ASL Literature Series (1994), and the poems told in the
DVDs entitled ASL Poetry: Selected Works of Clayton Valli
(1995) and The Treasure: Poems by Ella Mae Lentz (2006).
Another attempt to distinguish literature from non-
literature is to use the works by Roman Jakobson and Viktor
Shklovsky. As members of the Russian Formalism movement
in
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Spring 2019 – Issue 13