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This dissertation speaks to a massive dearth of research in African electronic literature (African e-lit), a discipline that boasts a growing number of works but little scholarship. With African literature incorporating digital technology into its creative process, and with electronic literary criticism focusing on areas outside its predominantly western cannon, African e-lit positions itself as an important area of scholarly endeavor. After considering the implications of placing African e-lit as the direction in which both African literature and electronic literature take, this dissertation looks at three different genres of African e-lit in the context of oral literature. There are analyses of examples of concrete poetry, conceptual poetry, and mobile video games, all from Ghana. Ultimately, the aim of this project is to ascertain the ways in which oral tradition influences the nature, form, and shape of African electronic literature.

What is reading? As a transitive verb, and in the strict action, it is to pass the view by the signs that we recognize from our mother tongue, written in a text to understand them and turn them into sounds. The act of reading goes beyond the interpretation of an inherited code. Reading is a cognitive visual/motor activity and meaningful of reality. When we read a text, our thinking manages a bunch of received information that little by little it is organizing according to its maturity, experience, cognitive processes, intuition and conceptualization. The order in which it happens does not matter. What is important is the fact that when it is read, the construction and appropriation of both historical and a-historical concepts is happening. But, what happens when we read Electronic Literature? Technology, following the proposal of Marshall McLujan, is an extension of our own body. For that matter, clothing is an extension of our skin. The shoes are an extension of our feet. One might think of the transitive verb of reading as a natural activity in the human being. Simone de Beauvoir affirms in her novel "Una Muerte muy Dulce" that neither death is natural. The act of reading has implicit the development of a technology of reading. So, we could make the statement that everything is Electronic Literature. You cannot think of reading as a natural act. The expansion of reading happens at the moment in which a common code is constructed that is accepted by a specific society as an element of meaning of identity. Thus, the idea of understanding ourselves as undifferentiated beings of nature is displaced. Code technology makes man more cultured. It subjects you to the understanding of reality. Reading will no longer be the understanding of sound, the use of taste as appropriation and cognition, touch as the experience of unity. The artificiality affirmed by Simone de Beauvoir and the extension proposed by Marshall McLujan coincide in the code of the written language subject to the truth, to the construction of concepts. The act of reading is now understood, not as passing the view on a text that contains an artificial and literal code; but as an act of acculturation and appropriation of an identity discourse. Sound and vision, substantial elements of the primitive, are reduced to the subjection of the text that is read and is true in itself.

(Source: Author's Abstract)