DOCSLIB.ORG

The Color Purple

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Color Purple Mo dern Critical Interpretations Nice Walker's The Color Purple Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS Philadelphia PS 3573 4425 c632s 2000 MAIN Contents @ 2000 by Chelsea House Publishers, a division of Editor's Note vii Main Line Book Co. Introduction @ 2000 by Harold Bloom Introduction 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be Harold Bloom repro?uced or transmitted in any form or,by any means withoot the written permission of the publisher. Roce, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple 3 Printed and bound in the United States of America Laaren Berlant 1098765432t Color Me Zora; Atrce Walker's (Re) Writing of the Speakerly Text 29 * The paper used in this publication meets the minimum Henry Louis Gatu Jr requirements of the American National Standard for Peimanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple 53 239.48-1984 bell hooks Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication,Data t'Show Alice Walker's The color purple / edited and with an intro- me How to Do Like You": Didacticism and the Epistolary Form in duction by Harold Bloom. The Color Purpk 67 p. cm.- (Modern critical interpretations) Thnaar Kntz Iniludes bibliographical references (p. ) and index' ISBN 0-7910-5666'X (alk. PaPer) To Do Revision Epistolary l. Walker, Nice, 1944 - Color PurPle. "Trying Without God": The of Address in Tbe 2. Afro-American woman in literature. Color Purple 77 I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. Carolyn Williams P53573.L425 C6325 2000 813''54-dc2t gg-o5zo2+ Romance, Marginaliql Mauilineaget Tlte Color Purple 89 CIP Molly Hite With Ears to Hear and Eyes to Seer Alice Walker's Parable Tlte Color Purple 107 Diane Gabriehen Scholl Contributing Editor: Erica DaCosta Tlte Color Purple: A Snrdy of Walker's Womanist Gospel ll9 Tlayline Jita Alhn ,l 2( HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. Color Me Zora: Alice Walker's (R.)Writing 9f the Speakerly Tbxt O, write my name, O write my name: O write my name . Write my name when-a you get home . Yes, write my name in the book of life . The Angels in the heav'n going-to write my name. Spiritual Underground Railroad My spirit leans in joyousness tow'rd thine, My gifted spirit, as with gladdened heart Mvvision flies along T;ffiEi#'ffi** orcolor,,, 1836 I am only a pen in His hand. Rebecca CoxJackson I'm just a link in a chain. Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools" D I- or just over two hundred years, the concern to depict the quest of the black speaking subject to find his or her voice has been a repeated topos of ItwnTlte SigntfyingMothey: ATltcory ofAfm:American Literary CriticinnbyHenryLouis GatesJr, O 1988 Henry Louis GatesJr. 29 HENRYLOUIS GATESJR. Color Me Zora: Nice Walker's (Re)Writing of the Speakerly Text 3l the black tradition, and perhaps has been its most central trope. As theme, as defined an entirely new mode of representation of the black quest to make revised trope, as a double-voiced narrative strategy, the representation of the text speak. characters and texts finding a voice has functioned as a sign both of the To begin to account for the Signifyin(g) revisions at work in Walker's formal unity of the Afro-American literary tradition and of the integrity of Tbe Cohr Purple, it is useful to recall the dream of literacy figured in John the black subjects depicted in this literature. Jea's autobiography. In Chapter 4, I maintained that Jea's odd revision of the Esu's double voice and the language of Signi$zin(g) have served scene of the Thlking Book served to erase the figurative potential of this throughout this book as uni$zing metaphors, indigenous to the tradition, trope for the slave narrators who followed him. After Jea, slave narrators both for patterns of revision from text to text and for modes of figuration at refigured a repeated scene of instruction in terms of reading and writing work within the text. The Anglo-African narrators published between 1770 rather than in terms of making the text speak. While these two tropes are and 1815 placed themselves in a line of descent through the successive obviously related, it seems equally obvious that the latter represents a key revision of one trope, of a sacred text that refuses to speak to its would-be reworking of the former, in terms more conducive to the direcdy polemical black auditor.ln Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston depicts role in which the slave narratives were engaged in an antebellum America her protagonist's ultimate moment of self-awareness in her ability to name seemingly preoccupied with the future of human slavery. her own divided consciousness. As an element of theme and as a highly While the trope of the Thlking Book disappeared from the male slave accomplished rhetorical strategy that depends for its effect on the bivocality narratives after Jea literalized it it is refigured in the mystical writings of of free indirect discourse, this voicing of a divided consciousness (another Rebecca Cox Jaclson, an Afro-American visionary and Shaker eldress who topos of the tradition) has been transformed in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo was a contemporary of Jea's. Jaclson was a free black woman who lived into a remarkably self-reflexive representation of the ironies of writing a text between 1795 and 1871. She was a fascinating religious leader and feminist, in which two foregrounded voices compete with each other for control of who founded a Shaker sisterhood in Philadelphia in 1857, after r difficult narration itself. Whereas the development of the tradition to the publication struggle with her family, with her initial religious denomination, and even of Their Eyes Were Watching God seems to have been preoccupied with the with the Shakers. Her extensive autobiographical writings (1830-1864) were mimetic possibilities of the speaking voice, black fiction aker Their Eyes collected and edited by Jean McMahon Humez, published in 1981, and would seem even more concerned to explore the implications of doubled reviewed by Alice Walker in that same year. The reconstitution ofJaclaon's voices upon strategies of writing. texts is one of the major scholarly achievements in Afro-American literature, Strategies as effective as Hurston's innovative use of free indirect lloth because of *1e richness of her texts and because the writings of black discourse and Reedt bifurcated narrative voice lead one to wonder how a women in antebellum America are painfully scarce, especially when rhetorical strategy could possibly extend, or Signify upon, the notions of cornpared to the large body of writings by black men. voice at play in these major texts of the black tradition. How could a text Jackson, like her contemporary black ex-slave writers, gives a possibly trope the extended strategies of voicing which we have seen to be in prclminent place in her texts to her own literary training. Hers is a divinely evidence in Their Eyes and in Mumbo Jumbo? To Sigrit, upon both Flurston's irrspired literacy training even more remarkable thanJea's. Writing between and Reed's strategies of narration would seem to demand a form of the novel Itt30 and 1832, just fifteen-odd years afterJea,Jaclson-with or withoutJea's that, at once, breaks with tradition yet revises the most salielt features tcxt in mind-refigures Jea's divine scene of instruction. Jackson's through which I have been defining the formal unity of this tradition. rcfiguration of this supernatural event, however, is cast within a sexual Just as Hurston's and Reed's texts present seemingly immovable opposition between male and female. Whereas her antecedents used the obstacles to an equally telling revision ofthe traditiont trope ofvoicing, so trope to define the initial sense of difference between slave and free, African too does Inaisible Man, the tradition's text of blackness and, in my opinion, its nncl European, Jackson's revision charts the liberation of a (black) woman most profound achievement in the novel. The first-person narration of fiom a (black) man over the letter of the text. I bracket black becatse, as we Inaisible 1y[6n, the valorization of oral narration in Their Eyes, and the shall see,Jackson freed herself of her brother's domination of her literacy and italicized interface of showiirg and telling in Mumbo Jumbo, taken together, lrer ability to interpret, but supplanted him with a mythical white male would seem to leave rather little space in which narrative innovation could intcrpreter. even possibly be attempted, Alice Walker's revisions of Their Eyes Were Jaclson, recalling Jee, writes, "After I rcccived the blessing of God, I Wtching God and of Rebcccn Cox Jeckron's G,itr of Powv, however, have had a grcat deeire to rcsd the Biblo," Lamenting the fEct that "I rm the only (Re)Writing 32 HENRYLOIIIS GATESJR. Color Me Zora: Nice Walker's of the Speakerly Text 33 child of my mother that had not learning," she seeks out her brother to "give was spoken in my mind, "Who learned the first man on earth?" me one hour,s lesson at night after supper or before we went to bed." Her "Why, God." "He is unchangeable, and if He learned the first brotheE a prominent clergl.nnan in the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal man to read, He can learn you." I laid down my dress, picked church, was often "so tired when he came home that he had not [the] power up my Bible, ran upstairs, opened it, and kneeled down with it the so to do," a situation, Jackson tells us, which would "grieve" her' But pressed to my breast, prayed earnestly to Almighty God if it situation that grieved Jacftson even more was her brother's penchant to was consisting to His holy will, to learn me to read His holy ,,rewrite,, her words, to revise her dictation, one supposes, to make them word.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Stylistic Peculiarities of Historiographic Metafiction in Year of Wonders by G
    MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF RUSSIAN FEDERATION Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education South Ural State University National Research University Institute of Linguistics and Intercultural Communications Department of Linguistics and Translation Studies ADMIT TO THESIS DEFENSE Head of department, DLitt, associate professor _______________ /T.N. Khomutova/ STYLISTIC PECULIARITIES OF HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION IN YEAR OF WONDERS BY G. BROOKS BACHELOR’S THESIS YUrGU – 45.03.02.2018.1363.VKR Supervisor, Candidate of Philological Sciences, associate professor _______________ /O.A Tolstykh/ «____» ________________ 2018 г. Author Student of the group LM-432 _______________/P.A. Chelpanova/ «____» ________________ 2018 г. Compliance supervisor, Candidate of Philological Sciences, associate professor _______________ /O.I. Babina/ «____» ________________ 2018 г. Defended with grade _____________________________ «____» ________________ 2018 г. Chelyabinsk 2018 CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................... 3 Chapter 1 Historiographic Metafiction ..................................................................... 5 1.1 Postmodernism ................................................................................................ 5 1.2 Postmodern literature ...................................................................................... 7 1.2.1 – Intertextuality: types and forms .........................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Alice Walker's the Color Purple
    Alice Walker's The Color Purple RUTH EL SAFFAR, University of Illinois Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) is the work that has made a writer who has published consistently good writing over the past decade and a half into some­ thing resembling a national treasure. Earlier works, like her collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble (1973), and her poems, collected under the title Revo­ lutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973), have won awards.' And there are other novels, short stories, poems, and essays that have attracted critical attention.2 But with The Color Purple, which won both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Alice Walker has made it onto everyone's reading list, bringing into our consciousness with clarity and power the long-submerged voice of a black woman raised southern and poor. Although Celie, the novel's principal narrator/character, speaks initially from a deeply regional and isolated perspective, both she and the novel ultimately achieve a vision which escapes the limitations of time and space. The Color Purple is a novel that explores the process by which one discovers one's essential value, and learns to claim one's own birthright. It is about the magical recovery of truth that a world caught in lies has all but obscured. Shug Avery, the high-living, self-affirming spirit through whom the transfor­ mation of the principal narrator/character takes place reveals the secret at a crucial point: "God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.
    [Show full text]
  • Addition to Summer Letter
    May 2020 Dear Student, You are enrolled in Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition for the coming school year. Bowling Green High School has offered this course since 1983. I thought that I would tell you a little bit about the course and what will be expected of you. Please share this letter with your parents or guardians. A.P. Literature and Composition is a year-long class that is taught on a college freshman level. This means that we will read college level texts—often from college anthologies—and we will deal with other materials generally taught in college. You should be advised that some of these texts are sophisticated and contain mature themes and/or advanced levels of difficulty. In this class we will concentrate on refining reading, writing, and critical analysis skills, as well as personal reactions to literature. A.P. Literature is not a survey course or a history of literature course so instead of studying English and world literature chronologically, we will be studying a mix of classic and contemporary pieces of fiction from all eras and from diverse cultures. This gives us an opportunity to develop more than a superficial understanding of literary works and their ideas. Writing is at the heart of this A.P. course, so you will write often in journals, in both personal and researched essays, and in creative responses. You will need to revise your writing. I have found that even good students—like you—need to refine, mature, and improve their writing skills. You will have to work diligently at revising major essays.
    [Show full text]
  • John Updike and the Grandeur of the American Suburbs Oliver Hadingham, Rikkyo University, Japan the Asian Conference on Literatu
    John Updike and the Grandeur of the American Suburbs Oliver Hadingham, Rikkyo University, Japan The Asian Conference on Literature, Librarianship & Archival Science 2016 Official Conference Proceedings Abstract The standing of John Updike (1932-2009), a multiple prize-winning author of more than 60 books, has suffered over the last two decades. Critics have recognized Updike’s skill as a writer of beautiful prose, but fail to include him among the highest rank of 20th century American novelists. What is most frustrating about the posthumous reputation of Updike is the failure by critics to fully acknowledge what is it about his books that makes them so enduringly popular. Updike combines beautifully crafted prose with something more serious: an attempt to clarify for the reader the truths and texture of America itself. Keywords: John Updike, middle-class, suburbia, postwar America iafor The International Academic Forum www.iafor.org Over the last few decades the reputation of John Updike (1932-2009) has suffered greatly. Updike's doggedness and craft as a writer turned him into a multi-prize winning author of 23 novels, fourteen poetry collections, ten hefty collections of essays, two books of art criticism, a play, some children's books, and numerous short story collections. Yet such a prolific output and the numerous awards won have not placed him among the greats of 20th century American literature. He is remembered as someone who could write elegant prose, but to no lasting effect in articulating something worthwhile. Since the acclaim and prizes showered on Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), Updike has fallen out of favour with the literary world.
    [Show full text]
  • The Complete Stories
    The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at the end Back Cover : "An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic. numinous and prophetic." -- New York Times "The Complete Stories is an encyclopedia of our insecurities and our brave attempts to oppose them." -- Anatole Broyard Franz Kafka wrote continuously and furiously throughout his short and intensely lived life, but only allowed a fraction of his work to be published during his lifetime. Shortly before his death at the age of forty, he instructed Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, to burn all his remaining works of fiction. Fortunately, Brod disobeyed. Page 1 The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka's stories, from the classic tales such as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony" and "The Hunger Artist" to less-known, shorter pieces and fragments Brod released after Kafka's death; with the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka's narrative work is included in this volume. The remarkable depth and breadth of his brilliant and probing imagination become even more evident when these stories are seen as a whole. This edition also features a fascinating introduction by John Updike, a chronology of Kafka's life, and a selected bibliography of critical writings about Kafka. Copyright © 1971 by Schocken Books Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
    [Show full text]
  • Book Discussion Schedules 2007
    COLUMBIAN BOOK DISCUSSION! SCHEDULE 2006-2007! !July - The Kite Runner by Kahled Hosseini! !August - March by Geraldine Brooks! !September - Digging to America by Anne Tyler! !October - The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson! !November - Peace Like a River by Lefi Enger! !January 4 - The Known World by Edwar P. Jones! !January 25 - Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks! !March 1 - Life of Pi by Yann Martel! !March 25 - My Antonia by Willa Cather! !April - Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns! !May - Charming Billy by Alice McDermott! !June - The Atonement by Ian MEwan! ! COLUMBIAN BOOK DISCUSSION! SCHEDULE 2007-2008! !September - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes! !October - A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini! !November - Gilead Marilynne Robinson! !January - The Road by Cormac McCarthy! !February - East of Eden by John Steinbeck! !March - Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels! !April - Last Night at the Lobster by Steward O’Nan! !May The Inheritance of Loss by Diran Desai! June - His Illegal Self by Peter Carey! ! ! COLUMBIAN BOOK DISCUSSION! SCHEDULE 2008-2009! !September - Middlemarch by Gearge Eliot! !October - Day by A. L. Kennedy! !November - Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton! !January - The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver! !February - Home by Marilynne Robinson! !March - The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan! !April - The vision of Emma Blau by Ursula Hegi! !May - Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston! !June - Crow Lake by Mary Lawson! ! COLUMBIAN BOOK DISCUSSION! SCHEDULE 2009-2010! !September - A Tale of
    [Show full text]
  • The Meaning of Love As Seen in Celie the Main Character of Alice Walker’S the Color Purple
    PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI THE MEANING OF LOVE AS SEEN IN CELIE THE MAIN CHARACTER OF ALICE WALKER’S THE COLOR PURPLE A SARJANA PENDIDIKAN THESIS Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain The Sarjana Pendidikan Degree in English Language Education By Maria Imnocensia Rosdewi Taeteti Student Number: 121214012 ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGE AND ARTS EDUCATION FACULTY OF TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2016 i PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI Don't You Quit When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, When the road you're trudging seems all uphill, When the funds are low and the debts are high, And you want to smile, but you have to sigh, When care is pressing you down a bit- Rest if you must, but don't you quit. Life is queer with its twists and turns, As every one of us sometimes learns, And many a fellow turns about When he might have won had he stuck it out. Don't give up though the pace seems slow - You may succeed with another blow. Often the goal is nearer than It seems to a faint and faltering man; Often the struggler has given up When he might have captured the victor's cup; And he learned too late when the night came down, How close he was to the golden crown. Success is failure turned inside out - The silver tint in the clouds of doubt, And you never can tell how close you are, It might be near when it seems afar; So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit - It's when things seem worst that you must not quit.
    [Show full text]
  • Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender Tales
    Indiana Law Journal Volume 80 Issue 2 Article 4 Spring 2005 Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender Tales Susan Frelich Appleton Washington University in St. Louis, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj Part of the Family Law Commons, and the Sexuality and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Appleton, Susan Frelich (2005) "Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender Tales," Indiana Law Journal: Vol. 80 : Iss. 2 , Article 4. Available at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ilj/vol80/iss2/4 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School Journals at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Indiana Law Journal by an authorized editor of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender Tales SUSAN FRELICH APPLETON* I. CAL AND His COHORT They're everywhere: transsexuals, intersexed individuals, and others of uncertain gender classification. Transgender issues have come out of the closet as popular culture seems to have discovered a new favorite. Recently, several successful books and movies, not to mention frequent television coverage on both talk shows and science programs, have introduced the public to numerous ordinary people whose very existence challenges the notion that sex and gender provide life's fundamental organizing principles. In turn, the law's reliance on strict sex-based categories becomes increasingly fragile, indeed too fragile to withstand challenges to marriage laws requiring a male and a female.
    [Show full text]
  • James A. Michener Interview, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist, St
    James A. Michener Interview, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist, St. Petersburg, Florida, January 10, 1991. Academy of Achievement Interviewer: Your novels, your big novels, go back pretty far to understand history and to understand people's lives. How far back do you have to go to understand James Michener? James Michener: That's a very complex question because I don't know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss, but you live with that loss. So, you don't have to go back very far. You can pick me up around 1912, when I was five years old. Academy of Achievement Interviewer: Your early life reads like a novel. Tell me about your childhood. James Michener: I lived in extreme poverty. We moved often in the dead of night, and on a few minutes notice. Some people recently have told me something I never realized or didn't deduce. My mother, who took in stray children and had eight or nine of them around sometimes, was employed by a real estate man who would move her into a house to sort of clean it up and renovate it and make it salable. Then we would move on. That might be true because that's the way it worked.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender Studies in Cormac Mccarthy's the Road
    ===================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 18:3 March 2018 Dr. T. Deivasigamani, Editor: Vol. II Black Writings: A Subaltern Perspective Annamalai University, Tamilnadu, India ===================================================================== Gender Studies in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road Kalithabegam, M.Phil. Scholar ================================================================== Courtesy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0330447548 Abstract This paper deals with the brief history of the Post-apocalyptic Fiction, “The Road”. Cormac McCarthy is an American Writer. The novel deals with the theme of Gender studies. This novel deals with two unnamed persons man and his son as they seek to survive. The Author is a =================================================================== Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 18:3 March 2018 Dr. T. Deivasigamani, Editor: Vol. II Black Writings: A Subaltern Perspective Kalithabegam, M.Phil. Scholar Gender Studies in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 86 specialist to give masculine gender very effectively and lack of female character. The woman is the wife of man and mother of the boy. The female characters are not found in the novel, the author did not give importance to the female character. The man portrayed as survival and boy as Morality. The man surviving toils in nature. The journey seems to be tough, that makes man and the boy feel hungry. Identifying the food is a continual struggle. The man falls in sick in the Journey. Nature is one thing, but man and boy survive other humans. The boy portrays as clear authority on morality. The man faces many struggles in their journey. His main intention is to protest boy his boy from others.
    [Show full text]
  • Annie Proulx—A Writer in Quest
    English Language and Literature Studies; Vol. 8, No. 4; 2018 ISSN 1925-4768 E-ISSN 1925-4776 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education Annie Proulx—A Writer in Quest Xiaojuan Liu1 1 College English Department, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China Correspondence: Xiaojuan Liu, College English Department, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China. Received: October 5, 2018 Accepted: October 30, 2018 Online Published: November 28, 2018 doi:10.5539/ells.v8n4p104 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/ells.v8n4p104 Abstract This article reviews Annie Proulx’s life and her writing career and examines the quest motif throughout her writing, in order to shed light on Annie Proulx studies. It explores Proulx’s insight into the existential predicament of contemporary people living in a post-industrial society as traditional culture is getting lost and traditional ways of living are out of date. By setting her characters on the journey of quest in an attempt to discover who they really are, Proulx has invigorated the traditional quest motif. Keywords: Annie Proulx, quest 1. Introduction As a fiction writer, fame came to Annie Proulx relatively late in life. When her first novel, Postcards (1992), won her the 1993 PEN\Faulkner Award for fiction, she was already 58 years old. As the first female writer who had breached this male cultural bastion (Note 1), she has written her name into the history of the award as well as that of American literature. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), which became a greater success both commercially and critically, sent Proulx directly to literary stardom.
    [Show full text]
  • Power and Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives Power and Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex By Lene Renneflott A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages In partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Master of Arts Degree UNIVERSITY OF OSLO Thesis supervisor: Rebecca Scherr Spring Term 2011 i Power and Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex By Lene Renneflott A Thesis Presented to: The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages In partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Arts Degree UNIVERSITY OF OSLO Thesis supervisor: Rebecca Scherr Spring Term 2011 ii © Lene Renneflott 2011 Power and Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex Lene Renneflott http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: Allkopi iii Abstract The main objective in this thesis is to point out the mechanisms that govern, and have governed, identity formation in the United States as played out in the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Looking more closely at how the characters are influenced by the powers and norms that govern their options, their place in society and their possibilities for a fulfilling life of personal freedom, the analysis in this thesis has concentrated on three main areas as these are portrayed in Middlesex: 1. Gender identity and sexual categorization 2. Race and whiteness 3. Immigration, class and the American Dream For a most part, this is a close reading of Middlesex, dwelling on the identity possibilities of the intersex protagonist Cal/lie, and especially his/her quest for self-identification.
    [Show full text]