At the same time, ASL literary forms were beginning to develop as the Deaf community began to tell each other stories in their own vernacular.
[5]: 8–9 Following the introduction of the Oral method, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) recorded a film project from 1913 through 1920 out of fear that ASL would not survive.
One of documented storytellers, John B. Hotchkiss, filmed a series of stories called Memories of Old Hartford about his time as a student at ASD in the 1860s.
[8]: 56–7 On the other hand, this development allows an audience to view a work of ASL literature long after it has been performed, so it is less likely to be lost to history.
[8]: 53–4 Veditz, who led the NAD film project from 1913 to 1920, was in part motivated by his desire to be able to view the signs of Deaf community members who had died, and to preserve ASL in its early 20th century form.
[3]: 1–2 This concept is related to the idea of multiliteracies, a term coined by the New London Group in 1996, based on the belief that literacy is created through social constructs rather than written representations of language.
[9]: 146–7 As literacy skills develop, so too do cognitive abilities in such a way that literate individuals can begin making inferences from language by applying their knowledge of the world to what is being said.
By allowing students to watch a video playback of themselves, they are able to develop their own language fluency by seeing which of their poetic or narrative works are more or less successful.
This process allows students to develop their own cognitive abilities and begin exploring deeper literary analyses of their own work.
[15]: 109–10 The device that allows ASL performers to create the illusion of varying distances of camera angle are the Classifiers that are prevalent in the language, which are used to visually demonstrate movement and action, size and shape, or states of being of people and objects.
Classifiers allow signers to use their hands, bodies and the signing space to visually define scenes and change the scale of what they are describing from distances ranging from microscopically close to distantly far.
A very common example of personification in sign language stories is using the storyteller's head to represent round objects such as different types of balls.
[8]: 61 This was paralleled by the ASL poetry scene that formed during the same decade at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, New York, which lasted until about 1991 when the poets moved their separate ways.
[4]: 467 One of the most notable exchanges was Deaf poet Patrick Graybill acting out an image of a "hydrogen jukebox" from Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" during a seminar in 1984.
Upon being asked why he chose the word 'hydrogen', Ginsburg explained that he wanted the apocalyptic imagery of the hydrogen bomb to work as a metaphor for the arrival of rock and roll music.
[4]: 464 Graybill's visual depiction in ASL of a "hydrogen jukebox" successfully brought the image to life, which is what Ginsberg was trying to accomplish through the words of his Beat poetry.
[3]: 6 Sutton-Spence notes that the energy of the poets at NTID in the 1980s was akin to Ginsberg's imagery, creating their own "ASL Poetry hydrogen jukebox".
Furthermore, given that an oral poet is usually a member of the community to whom they are performing, other observers who lack the group's cultural knowledge may miss nuances that the target audience understands.
[21] Some well known deaf poets are Clayton Valli, Ella Mae Lentz, and Patrick Graybill,[22] who are all featured on the 1990 video series, Poetry in Motion: Original Works in ASL.
For instance, in Valli's poem "Snowflake", the signs for LEAVES-FALL and GRASS-WITHER both phrases use two hands in the 5 handshape that move in a downward motion with a furrowed brow, creating three simultaneous rhymes.
He notes that the visual and kinetic nature of ASL allows 'line' to be analyzed in terms of the body's movements through space, so that 'line' is no longer limited to a strict left-to-right direction.
[15]: 110 Ben Bahan defines folktales in American Sign Language literature as stories that have long existed in the community without a known origin.
Susan Rutherford and Simon Carmel are the most prominent researchers of ASL folklore documenting stories in which members of the Deaf community connect with each other despite obstacles that would prevent them from doing so.
[25] The National Theatre for the Deaf's Mission Statement is: "To present theatrical work of the highest quality, performing in the unique style we created through blending American Sign Language and Spoken Word".
Many of the NTD productions are both spoken and signed at the same time, allowing Deaf actors to perform in their natural manner of communication while also encouraging hearing audiences to come experience this type of theatre.
[28] Themes that are common to ASL literature genres typically reflect the shared life experiences of the American Deaf community.
In the version retold by Sam Supalla, a young Deaf boy does not want to return home to his hearing family for the weekend.
One day, a student is upset because she does not want to return home to her Deaf family for the weekend, so he comforts her by telling her of the planet Earth, where the majority of people can hear and communicate by speaking.
[5]: 117 This story is a powerful demonstration that the men's shared Deaf identity superseded all other connections or alliances they had formed to the outside world.
[5]: 120 Ben Bahan's story, "Bird of a Different Feather", creates an allegory about the oppression that some Deaf children face when born into hearing families,[3]: 12 and also uses the imagery of the absence of light.