Prompt no. 1
Robinson’s story, “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England,” was a very interesting read (and listen). I am a relatively fast reader, but on my first time reading this story (silently), I found myself slowing down and focusing on the cadence of the words as I “spoke” them inside my mind. In this way, the story had a slightly awkward feeling to it, as my reading pace kept speeding up and then slowing down; I found myself having trouble focusing on the content of the story, as I kept struggling to figure out how to read it. I think this tension arose because the use of repetition, short lines, and “simple” language would usually make it easy for me to read very quickly, and skim through a story; however, these same qualities also made me want to slow down and experience the rhythm of the syntax. Additionally, the way it is formatted in short lines makes the story “look” on the page (at least to me) like a poem, another type of literature that I would ordinarily read slowly. As King writes, Robinson “develops what we might want to call an oral syntax that defeats readers’ efforts to read the stories silently to themselves, a syntax that encourages readers to read the stories out loud” (King 186). I concur with King; I think my feeling of discomfort is evidence that Robinson successfully translated an oral story into written language without compromising the tradition of oral storytelling.
The second time I read the story went smoother. Reading it out loud provided a kind of metronome for me to abide by, and I was able to fall into a satisfying rythme. I actually enjoy reading books out loud, and often read stuff aloud with my friends and family–or even by myself, sometimes. However, the things I read are usually not written like “Coyote Makes a Deal with King of England.” The books I read are usually written in “standard” English, with the closest thing to Robinson’s story being bits of dialogue. I found it slightly odd to read a story in a conversational tone that wasn’t my own. I found myself wondering, as I read, whether I should read this story exactly as it is written, to try to capture the authentic oral experience that Robinson was transmitting, or whether it would be more appropriate/authentic to modify the story with my own oral idiosyncrasies, to change the phrases that felt awkward (to my ears) to ones that were more familiar. When I got a friend to read it to me, I found myself much more able to relax into the experience and focus on the story itself, and not its rhetorical strategies.
Works Cited
Crampton, Linda. “Oral Storytelling, Ancient Myths, and a Narrative Poem.” Owlcation, 3 Mar. 2021, owlcation.com/humanities/Oral-Storytelling-an-Ancient-Myth-and-a-Narrative-Poem.
Hardach, Sophie. “Why You Should Read This Out Loud.” British Broadcasting Corporation, 17 Sep. 2020, www.bbc.com/future/article/20200917-the-surprising-power-of-reading-aloud.
