ASL Literature, Discourse, and Cultural Products
This domain tests your knowledge of ASL literary genres, performance conventions, and the discourse rules of Deaf interaction. Items ask you to identify a genre, name a device, or explain why a performance choice works.
Genres and devices
- ASL literature is performed "orature," transmitted face to face and owned by the community; printed Deaf literature (plays, poetry in English) is a related but distinct tradition.
- ABC stories: a narrative whose signs follow the manual alphabet in order, A to Z, with meaning carried by context, classifiers, and mime.
- Number stories, handshape stories, and classifier stories impose a similar formal constraint and showcase inventiveness.
- Poetry devices: handshape rhyme, movement rhythm, repetition, symmetry, neologism, metaphor built from classifiers, and "bopping" (rhythmic body movement).
- Visual vernacular uses cinematic techniques - zoom, pan, framing, slow motion - within signing space.
- Role shift (constructed action or dialogue) shifts body orientation, eye gaze, and facial expression to portray a character.
Discourse norms
- Attention-getting: waving in the sightline, tapping a shoulder or table, flashing lights; never grabbing the face or hands.
- Turn-taking: holds, eye-gaze shifts, and pauses signal boundaries; backchanneling uses head nods, facial signals, and signs such as RIGHT.
- Directness and information-sharing are valued; leave-taking can be lengthy; "one-up" floor-holding is common in Deaf storytelling.
- Register shifts occur between formal lectures, casual conversation, and ritualized narrative performance.
Worked example
A performer tells a baseball game story using only A-handshapes in alphabetical sequence. Reasoning: the constraint is formal, not semantic - the sequence A, B, C and so on organizes the signs; meaning comes from classifiers (a hand as a ball or bat), role shift (batter, umpire), and mime; the audience recognizes the genre and appreciates the skill of fitting content to constraint. Evaluating it as "bad ASL" because the handshapes are unusual misses the genre entirely.
Traps
- Treating ASL poetry as translation of English poems into signs.
- Missing role shift and calling it "acting out" or "charades."
- Applying hearing conversational norms, such as judging directness as rude or all touching as inappropriate.
- Ignoring genre constraints when judging handshape or number stories.
- Assuming Deaf literature exists only in print.