Re-theorising Orality in Yoruba Literature: From D.O. Fagunwa to Contemporary Digital Storytelling

The concept of orality in African literary criticism has been theorised primarily in relation to the oral-written binary established by Ong and Havelock, yet the emergence of digital storytelling platforms has introduced a third mediational dimension that existing theoretical frameworks inadequately account for. This dissertation re-theorises orality in Yoruba literature across three historical moments: the foundational oral-to-written transition in D.O. Fagunwa's novels, the intermediate moment of Yoruba radio drama and television serialisation, and the contemporary moment of digital storytelling on YouTube, podcast platforms, and social media. Using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and digital ethnography across three bodies of Yoruba creative text, the study develops an original theoretical framework, the Yoruba Transmediatic Orality Model, that accounts for how oral aesthetic conventions, including formulaic composition, direct address, call-and-response structures, and proverb deployment, are transformed through successive mediational transitions. Existing scholarship on Yoruba orality and literature has produced rich textual studies but has not developed a unified theoretical account spanning print, broadcast, and digital media. This dissertation makes an original contribution to African literary theory and media studies. Findings will demonstrate that digital storytelling in Yoruba represents not a degradation of oral tradition but a creative remediatisation that preserves core oral aesthetic values while introducing new participatory and interactive dimensions. Keywords: orality, Yoruba literature, digital storytelling, transmediatic aesthetics, Fagunwa.