Download or read book The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston written by Pin-chia Feng and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1998 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study traces the textual construction of identity in the female Bildungsroman of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. Deploying the «politics of rememory» in their textual representation of female development, Morrison and Kingston unearth the multiple layers of repressed memories, including personal stories, specific cultural history, and racial experience of African- and Asian-American women. This book analyzes the working through of repressed memories in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men. The gap between Bildung and anti-Bildung in these texts highlights the multiple oppression faced by women of color and interrogates the established standards and value system of the hegemonic culture.
Download or read book Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman written by Ellen McWilliams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work - her own 'coming of age' fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle - both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early novels, paying particular attention to Atwood's preoccupation with survival as a key symbol of Canadian literature, culture, and identity. She also considers the genre's afterlife on display in Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Moral Disorder, in which the formulations of selfhood and identity in Atwood's early fiction are revisited and developed. Atwood emerges as a writer who self-consciously invokes and then undercuts the traditions of the Bildungsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliams's book furthers our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fiction and contributes to ongoing conversations about the role gender and cultural contexts play in reframing generic boundaries.
Download or read book Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison’s novels: The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Beloved. Heinert argues how Morrison’s novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the novel itself. This study goes beyond formalist analyses to show how these revisions expose the relationship between race, conventional generic forms, and the dominant culture. Morrison’s revisions critique the conventional roles of African Americans as subjects of and in the genre of the novel, and (re)write roles which instead privilege their subjectivity. This study provides readers with new ways of understanding Morrison’s novels. Whereas critics often fault Morrison for breaking with traditional forms and resisting resolution in her novels, this analysis show how Morrison’s revisions shift the narrative truth of the novel from its representation in conventional forms to its interpretation by the readers, who are responsible for constructing their own resolution or version of narrative truth. These revisions expose how the dominant culture has privileged specific forms of narration; in turn, these forms privilege the values of the dominant culture. Morrison’s novels attempt to undermine this privilege and rewrite the canon of American literature.
Download or read book Maxine Hong Kingston written by Helena Grice and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular -- and controversial -- writers in the Asian American literary tradition. In this volume Grice traces Kingston's development as a writer and cultural activist through both ethnic and feminist discourses, investigating her novels, occasional writings and her two-book 'life-writing project'. The publication of The Woman Warrior not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity -- or fakery -- of her cultural references. Grice traces the debates through the appearance of China Men (1981), as well as the novels, Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and her most recent work, The Fifth Book of Peace. Maxine Hong Kingston will be of value to students and academics researching in the areas of diaspora writing, contemporary American and Asian- Amercianfiction, as well as feminist and postcolonial literature.
Download or read book Unsettling the Bildungsroman written by Stella Bolaki and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2011 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unsettling the Bildungsroman combines genre and cultural theory and offers a cross-ethnic comparative approach to the tradition of the female novel of development and the American coming-of-age narrative. Examines the work of Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Audre Lorde.
Download or read book The Problems of ethnic female Adolescents as portrayed in Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye Maxine Hong Kingston s The Woman Warrior Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street written by Anna Watorczyk and published by diplom.de. This book was released on 2005-09-26 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: African-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American female adolescents are representatives of minority groups in the United States. The three groups of ethnic girls were assigned derogative stereotypes by many Euro-American writers who did not portray their characters authentically. The modern female ethnic authors undertake the battle with stereotypes that are the main source of girls problems. They attempt to convince the reader that the lives of young girls cannot be interpreted according to offending images imposed on them. This thesis aims to draw attention to the problems encountered by female ethnic adolescents in Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye (1970), Maxine Hong Kingston s The Woman Warrior (1976), Sandra Cisneros The House on Mango Street (1984) and to portray their survival or collapse in American society. Each of the books presented in the present study is a masterpiece of great literary value. Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. Sandra Cisneros was the winner of the 1985 Before Columbus American Book Award. Maxine Kingston won the National Book Critics Award with The Woman Warrior, which was designated as non-fiction in 1976. All of these books contribute significantly to the study of ethnic female adolescents. The books chosen for the purpose of this thesis portray girls in an adolescent period. The adolescents presented in this study are aged between ten and twenty-one and are socially, economically and politically dependent on their parents or guardians. To further complicate matters, the experiences of girls of colour are more complex than those encountered by white adolescents. As the typical conflicts within the family, problems with gender, sexual development, education and friends are juxtaposed with issues of racism and very often a lower social status. In the light of these facts it does not come as a surprise that many ethnic adolescent girls have problems finding their self . The first section of the initial chapter of this thesis takes into consideration the stereotypical image of Euro-American adolescent girl as it often serves as a contradiction of the popular images of ethnic girls. Furthermore, the chapter examines stereotypes of African-American, Chinese-American and Mexican-American adolescents. Despite their variety, the stereotypes are the cause of girls victimisation in society. The five following chapters analyse the problems more often [...]
Download or read book Rethinking the Bildungsroman written by Pin-Chia Feng and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Race and Gender in Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye written by Kathrin Rosenbaum and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Throughout history, the highly contested concepts of race and gender have adversely shaped the lives of millions of people. In the United States it is most notably Native Africans and African Americans who have been victimized on the grounds of their skin color. Women of African descent have suffered a double jeopardy due to the intersection of race and gender. For a great many of African Americans, men and women alike, literature has become an “important vehicle to represent the social context, to expose inequality, racism and social injustice.” In The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison explores the issue of African American female identity. The female Bildungsroman scrutinizes the problem of growing up black and female in a society which equates beauty with blue-eyed whiteness. Consumer goods, the media, adult approval and a dismissive attitude towards her mislead the protagonist Pecola Breedlove to internalize white beauty standards. With the story of Pecola, Morrison points out how the internalization leads to racial self-loathing and eventually to self-destruction. Nonetheless, the negative tone of The Bluest Eye is in part counteracted through Claudia MacTeer, whose narrative is juxtaposed to Pecola’s anti-Bildung and thus turns the novel into a double Bildungsroman with one girl “growing up” and the other one “growing down.” The following thesis will focus on the issues of race and gender in The Bluest Eye. The topic can be considered of particular relevance as it addresses a theme which remained unexamined until the 1970s, a theme which many have not wanted to know about and which others have been in denial about. Morrison, though, faces the truth about the intersection of race and gender by exploring in her novel how racism and sexism function, as well as the devastating consequences that can occur. Her debut further underlines that the search for culprits is complicated since the perpetrators in the crimes against Pecola are often victims themselves. [...]
Download or read book Geographies of Girlhood in US Latina Writing written by Andrea Fernández-García and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an in-depth study of Latina girls, portrayed in five coming-of-age narratives by using spaces and places as hermeneutical tools. The texts under study here are Julia Alvarez’s Return to Sender (2009), Norma E. Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street: An Autobiography (1993), and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) and Almost a Woman (1998). Unlike most representations of Latina girls, which are characterized by cultural inaccuracies, tropes of exoticism, and a tendency to associate the host society with modernity and their girls’ cultures of origin with backwardness and oppression, these texts contribute to reimagining the social differently from what the dominant imagery offers. By illustrating the vexing phenomena the characters have to negotiate on a daily basis (such as racism, sexism, and displacement), these narratives open avenues for a critical exploration of the legacies of colonial modernity. This book, therefore, not only enables an analysis of how the girls’ development is shaped by these structures of power, but also shows how such legacies are reversed as the characters negotiate their identities. It breaks with the longstanding characterization of young people, and especially Latina girls, as voiceless and deprived of agency, showing readers that this youth group also has say in controlling their lifeworlds.
Download or read book Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming of Age Novels written by Jennifer Ho and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.
Download or read book Reading Khaled Hosseini written by Rebecca Stuhr and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses Hosseini's fiction and its relation to current events and popular culture.
Download or read book Black British Literature written by Mark Stein and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Mark Stein examines black British literature, centering on a body of work created by British-based writers with African, South Asian, or Caribbean cultural backgrounds. Linking black British literature to the bildungsroman genre, this study examines the transformative potential inscribed in and induced by a heterogeneous body of texts. Capitalizing on their plural cultural attachments, these texts portray and purvey the transformation of post-imperial Britain. Stein locates his wide-ranging analysis in both a historical and a literary context. He argues that a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach is essential to understanding post-colonial culture and society. The book relates black British literature to ongoing debates about cultural diversity, and thereby offers a way of reading a highly popular but as yet relatively uncharted field of cultural production. With the collapse of its empire, with large-scale immigration from former colonies, and with ever-increasing cultural diversity, Britain underwent a fundamental makeover in the second half of the twentieth century. This volume cogently argues that black British literature is not only a commentator on and a reflector of this makeover, but that it is simultaneously an agent that is integral to the processes of cultural and social change. Conceptualizing the novel of transformation, this comprehensive study of British black literature provides a compelling analytic framework for charting these processes.
Download or read book From Shadow to Presence written by Jelena Šesnic and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume departs from a more static concept of identity politics to engage the varied and entangled processes of ethnic/racial, national, and gender identifications in a range of contemporary US ethnic texts (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s). Recognizing the growing salience of variously named ethnic, multicultural, and minority literatures as they are produced and circulated in the USA and worldwide nowadays, this work charts four broadly defined models of approaching such texts: cultural nationalism, ethnic feminism, borderlands and contact zones, and finally, the diasporic model. Drawing extensively on psychoanalytic theory, feminist/gender studies, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and its revision of ethnography, the book offers a fresh, engaged, theoretically, and analytically well-rehearsed overview of the distinctive and determining features of a rapidly expanding domain of contemporary US literary production, namely, ethnic literatures. Of potential interest to scholars of American/US literature, but also minority and postcolonial literatures, and to students of American literature, the book attempts an interethnic comparative approach to well- and lesser-known texts. Among the authors represented are Shawn Wong, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, Denise Chávez, Rolando Hinojosa, Roberto Fernández and Edwidge Danticat.
Download or read book Unreliable Truths written by Sissy Helff and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many people see ‘home’ as the domestic sphere and place of belonging, it is hard to grasp its manifold implications, and even harder to provide a tidy definition of what it is. Over the past century, discussion of home and nation has been a highly complex matter, with broad political ramifications, including the realignment of nation-states and national boundaries. Against this backdrop, this book suggests that ‘home’ is constructed on the assumption that what it defines is constantly in flux and thus can never capture an objective perspective, an ultimate truth. Along these lines, Unreliable Truths offers a comparative literary approach to the construction of home and concomitant notions of uncertainty and unreliable narration in South Asian diasporic women’s literature from the UK, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Canada. Writers discussed in detail include Feroza Jussawalla, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Meera Syal, Farida Karodia, Shani Mootoo, Shobha Dé, and Oonya Kempadoo. With its focus on transcultural homes, Unreliable Truths goes beyond discussions of diaspora from an established postcolonial point of view and contributes with its investigation of transcultural unreliable narration to the representation of a g/local South Asian diaspora.
Download or read book Food and Media written by Jonatan Leer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food is everywhere in contemporary mediascapes, as witnessed by the increase in cookbooks, food magazines, television cookery shows, online blogs, recipes, news items and social media posts about food. This mediatization of food means that the media often interplays between food consumption and everyday practices, between private and political matters and between individuals, groups, and societies. This volume argues that contemporary food studies need to pay more attention to the significance of media in relation to how we 'do' food. Understanding food media is particularly central to the diverse contemporary social and cultural practices of food where media use plays an increasingly important but also differentiated and differentiating role in both large-scale decisions and most people's everyday practices. The contributions in this book offer critical studies of food media discourses and of media users' interpretations, negotiations and uses that construct places and spaces as well as possible identities and everyday practices of sameness or otherness that might form new, or renew old food politics.
Download or read book Ideology written by James Decker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise introduction to the concept of ideology provides an overview of the term and considers its impact on literary theory. James M. Decker analyzes the history of Western ideology from its pre-Enlightenment roots to its current incarnations, providing readers with both an essential overview of key terms and issues and a thoughtful assessment of some of the important critical thinkers associated with the notion, including Marx, Gramsci and Althusser. Ideological theories are introduced within three broad categories - the subjective, the institutional and the political - which helps students to synthesize a concept that sprawls across the traditional disciplinary lines of philosophy, politics, economics, history and cultural and literary studies. Close readings of key texts demonstrate the impact of ideology on critical practice and literary reputation. Texts include: - Toni Morrison's Sula - William Faulkner's 'Barn Burning' - George Orwell's 1984 Compact and easy-to-follow, Decker's study finally asks: are we now in a 'post-ideological' era?
Download or read book Analyzing World Fiction written by Frederick Luis Aldama and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are many readers drawn to stories that texture ethnic experiences and identities other than their own? How do authors such as Salman Rushdie and Maxine Hong Kingston, or filmmakers in Bollywood or Mexico City produce complex fiction that satisfies audiences worldwide? In Analyzing World Fiction, fifteen renowned luminaries use tools of narratology and insights from cognitive science and neurobiology to provide answers to these questions and more. With essays ranging from James Phelan's "Voice, Politics, and Judgments in Their Eyes Were Watching God" and Hilary Dannenberg's "Narrating Multiculturalism in British Media: Voice and Cultural Identity in Television" to Ellen McCracken's exploration of paratextual strategies in Chicana literature, this expansive collection turns the tide on approaches to postcolonial and multicultural phenomena that tend to compress author and narrator, text and real life. Striving to celebrate the art of fiction, the voices in this anthology explore the "ingredients" that make for powerful, universally intriguing, deeply human story-weaving. Systematically synthesizing the tools of narrative theory along with findings from the brain sciences to analyze multicultural and postcolonial film, literature, and television, the contributors pioneer new techniques for appreciating all facets of the wonder of storytelling.
