Literacies of resistance: Script and voice in five twentieth century women's novels.

摘要

The novels of the five twentieth century American women writers I examine reveal that a fictive representation of historical violence, a representation that refuses to reinforce violating linguistic and cognitive structures tends to, as Abena Busia argues in "Words Whispered Over Voids; A Context for Black Women's Rebellious Voices in the Novel of the African Diaspora," "both employ and defy the written word and the printed page" (15). My study, which includes three novels by African American women writers, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, and extends to one European American woman writer's work, H.D.'s The Gift, and one Native American woman writer's work, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, identifies a privileging of the spoken word as represented by and in written script as a major strategy of resistance to the ways language is complicit with violence. This is not to suggest that there is a simple opposition drawn between the oral and the written, the spoken and the scripted, in the works examined here. Rather, a complex weaving of what Karla Holloway calls "structures of orature" in and through written texts emerges as a defining characteristic of these texts which are openly concerned with the deconstruction of hegemonic ways of knowing and writing.