| Sumario: | Thomas Wolfe's "The Web of Earth" is an experimental novella that provides particular insight into modernism's oral/textual dynamic. In "The Web of Earth" Wolfe employs the rhythmic talk of oral poets who relied on regular cadences and parataxis to aid their memory and to convey their thoughts. Ultimately, the novella's web-like pattern derives from the fact that oral poets stitched together prefabricated parts non in linear profession by in a collage of scene weaved around accumulating sets of epithets, phrases, formulas and proverbs that were balanced though repetition. Another important oral technique that Wolfe employs is the cliché. While trite expressions and phrases are frowned upon in literate cultures, in oral cultures they serve as important formulas that set characters and themes into familiar contexts. The oral tradition Wolfe evokes in "The Web of Earth" is one where bragging bout one's own prowess and tongue-lashing one's rivals is as important as the story one relates. With "The Web of Earth" he more than answered the challenge set by his peers, composing the novella in the same era in which Sinclair Lewis parodied bourgeois discourses in "Babbit." The strength of "The Web of Earth" lies in Wolfe's ability to employ oral narrative methods that stay true to modernist invention, relaying folkloric and cultural information in an intricate collage-like pattern that seems yet ordinarily distant.
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