| dc.description | As this study argues, aesthetic considerations also play a critical role in their deployment of multimedia to realize creativity and achieve artistic variation. It is in this way that oral artists elaborate and improvise during oral performances, thereby continuing to engage their audiences. Specifically, I will examine the social aesthetic paradigms of sociability, the physical setting of the performance, and the belief system or worldview of the Themne, and consider the ways in which these factors engender artistic variation and creativity. I will also consider the ramifications of social aesthetics and multimedia for the audiences' appreciation and interpretation of the oral performance. My social aesthetic inquiry will not focus on an analysis of story texts per se, but on the physical setting and sociocultural conventions of Themne storytelling practices. The focus is on aspects of social aesthetics that impinge on artistic variation and creativity in storytelling and on processes of active audience participation in the delivery and interpretation of oral performances. I hope that such an analysis of the Themne oral artist's ability to exploit the aesthetic resources of the performance setting will lend weight to calls for scholars to pay due attention to the uniqueness of each performance and to capture, transcribe, and translate the "externalities" of a given performance as deployed by the oral artist.4 | eng |
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