Story-Telling in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences

43104

Story-telling has been used for various reasons and variety of purposes of the authors in contemporary American drama. The most distinctive contemporary American authors such as Edward Albee, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, and August Wilson to name only the few create story-tellers in their prominent plays. The tensions between past and present, self and other, life and death, and the subjects as confusion, self-doubt, and self-questioning in an unstable and infinitely changeable state of insights fill the narrative form of contemporary American dramatists through story-telling. Employing stories as stage narrative, the authors can have a fictional space outside stage time and stage space, and the authors can make fact a fiction or vice versa. Story-telling as dramatic narrative can specifically be seen in the dramas of August Wilson as part of the oral narrative experiences of African-Americans. This study attempts to reflect the functions of story-telling in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences, and analyze how the characters reveal themselves and their subjectivity in stories. Wilson’s typical story-tellers are Toledo in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Troy Maxson in Fences.

151

Story , telling , August Wilson , Contemporary American Drama , Subjectivity , African , American Culture

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences

158

Journal Of Graduate School Of Social Sciences