Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities

243 Pages·2011·1.658 MB·

by  Mary Jane Hurst (auth.)

AMERICAN LITERATURE READINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of
the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the
Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote
By Thomas Fahy
Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics
By Steven Salaita
Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From
Faulkner to Morrison
By Kelly Lynch Reames
American Political Poetry in the 21st Century
By Michael Dowdy
Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain,
and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity
By Sam Halliday
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness
By Michael Nowlin
Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
By Melissa Bostrom
Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry
By Nicky Marsh
James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence
By Piotr K. Gwiazda
Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism
Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez
The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow
and Don DeLillo
By Stephanie S. Halldorson
Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction
By Amy L. Strong
Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism
By Jennifer Haytock
The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut
By David Simmons
Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American
Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko
By Lindsey Claire Smith
The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The
House Abandoned
By Marit J. MacArthur
Narrating Class in American Fiction
By William Dow
The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern
American Narrative
By Heather J. Hicks
Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles
By Kenneth Lincoln
Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the
South, and Southern Literary Production
By Catherine Seltzer
New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut
Edited by David Simmons
Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech
By Dianne L. Chambers
The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682–1826: Gender,
Action, and Emotion
By Denise Mary MacNeil
Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle
in the Forest
Edited by John Whalen-Bridge
Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction
By Christopher Kocela
Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction:
American Voices and American Identities
By Mary Jane Hurst
Language, Gender,
and Community in Late
Twentieth-Century Fiction
American Voices and American Identities
Mary Jane Hurst
LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND COMMUNITY IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION
Copyright © Mary Jane Hurst, 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11045-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-29289-9 ISBN 978-0-230-11826-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230118263
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hurst, Mary Jane, 1952–
Language, gender, and community in late twentieth-century fiction :
American voices and American identities / Mary Jane Hurst.
p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. American fi ction—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Communities in literature. 3. Language and languages in literature.
4. Gender identity in literature. 5. National characteristics, American in
literature. 6. Multiculturalism in literature. I. Title.
PS374.C586H87 2011
813(cid:2).709355—dc22 2010035923
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2011
For Dan, Katherine, and Chris
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Finding One’s Place by Finding One’s Voice in
Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying and
Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy 21
3 Language and Gender in the Academic Communities
of Ann Beattie’s Another You and John Updike’s
Memories of the Ford Administration 51
4 Balancing Self and Other through Speech and Silence
in Chang-r ae Lee’s Native Speaker and Amy Tan’s
The Hundred Secret Senses 77
5 Love, Destruction, and Wounded Hearts in the
Fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris 103
6 Contours of the Future in Denise Chávez’s Face of
an Angel and Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque 139
7 Twenty-F irst- Century Reflections on American
Voices and American Identities 171
Notes 185
Bibliography 193
Index 219
Preface
Art provides the means not only to express and experience the emo-
tional and intellectual range of human capacity, but also to escape
finite boundaries and seek awareness beyond that which already
exists. The literary arts, especially in narrative forms, appeal to us in
part because they portray ways of perceiving, organizing, and under-
standing the world, thereby enabling or inspiring readers to perceive,
organize, and understand the world anew. In reading fiction, we are
able to observe and engage in a process of discovery about the char-
acters, plots, settings, and themes created by the author. Through
literary criticism, we continue that process of discovery and extend it
to the discovery of process; that is, we aim to enhance the discovery
of texts that authors have created and, in addition, we aim to develop
understandings of the processes that flow into and out of the cre-
ation and interpretation of texts. Both the ease and the difficulty of
approaching recent or contemporary fiction lie in the familiarity of
the discoveries and of the processes. But, like all literary art, recent
fiction and criticism offer opportunities for new and renewed insights
about literature and about life.
Language, which is one of the distinctive features making humans
human, is the medium of literature and the means of communica-
tion between and among authors, characters, and readers. Gender
has always been a basic organizing principle in life, of course, but
acute questioning of assumptions about gender and gender roles is
a primary feature of recent and contemporary cultures. The place
of the individual with respect to the surrounding community has
been an essential tension in American culture and American lit-
erature since the founding of the United States, but a variety of
factors heightened sensitivities about personal and group identities
in the 1990s at the approach of a new century and a new millen-
nium. Language allows for the construction and performance of
gender and for the construction and performance of individual and
community identity. In fiction across the many American commu-
nities of the 1990s, the universal themes of language, gender, and
x PREFACE
community are intertwined in interesting, instructive, and some-
times inspiring ways. Recognizing and exploring these themes offer
opportunities for processes of discovery and for discoveries of pro-
cess about American voices and American identities in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries.
Acknowledgments
I am most grateful to all my teachers, colleagues, students, friends,
and, especially, family members, who recently, in the past, and over
many decades have influenced my understanding of literature, lan-
guage, and life in expected and unexpected ways. Any and all short-
comings in this volume or in me are, of course, my own, and I
apologize for them. I appreciate the long periods of other work that
kept me from this project, for such time allowed me to reflect more
deeply and at greater length about the issues. I appreciate the brief but
crucial research leaves that allowed me time first to commence and
then to conclude this project. Though I have not had the privilege of
meeting them in person, I thank the wonderful writers whose nov-
els are discussed here. I acknowledge with fondness and appreciation
LASSO, the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, as some of my
early thoughts about language, gender, and community formed my
presidential address to the association and were printed as such in the
1998 Southwest Journal of Linguistics.