Significant passages in Alice Walker's writings give evidence of archetypal patterns from Carl Jung and feminine archetypal patterns from Annis Pratt. Since a knowledge of archetypal patterns can influence the total understanding of aspects of Walker's writings, a study of these patterns in the undergraduate classroom benefits the student and opens up another system of analyzing writings, particularly writings by African-American women.

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dialect is introduced. Toni Morrison's ce Walker's analyse the way in which Michael Žantovsk Nejmodřejší oči ) and Jiří The thesis is concluded with a part that focuses on Zora Neale Hurston's The novel's language is analysed compared to the novels by Walker and Morrison, and the analysis presents specifics of Hurston's portrayal of African American ejich oči

身為黑人女作家，受麗絲華克在小說《紫色姊妹花》中，犀利地揭露黑人女性遭受性別與種族歧視的迫害，藉此喚醒世人重視性別與種族的不平等，重賦黑人女性獨立的聲音。本論文旨在剖析華克如何顛覆文學與社會意識型態傳統，再次肯定黑人女性生存價值的信念。論文的第一章檢視小說申的書信體形式，除了分析其與小說主旨的關係，並探討小說中所使用的敘述觀點如何強化主題。第二章討論性別議題與小說中女性角色的錯綜關係，華克如何顛覆歐陸灰姑娘的神話，並加鋪述女性對裁縫（對文字的剪裁）的特殊才能。第三章研究父權制度與種族歧視的雙重壓力如何導致女性消音，並且抑制女性自我認同屬性，分析小說語言的運用，以及書名與小說結尾的意涵。華克呈現女主角從沈默到反抗的過程，並確立女性在文學的影響力。 / Being a black female writer profoundly concerned with the pling of black women, Alice walker sensitively exposes the impact of sexism and racism on black women in her novel The Color Purple, with a view to making the world aware of sexual and racial inequality and finding a voice that belongs to black women. The present study proposes to investigate how Walker subverts both literary and social conventions in her novel and to present her unwavering resolution to affirm the existence of all black women. The first chapter examines the epistolary form in the novel, with a detailed analysis of its relationship with the thematic messages of the novel, and discusses how the point of view in the novel reinforces the thematic concerns. Chapter II deals with gender issue and the structure of relationships among the female characters, focusing on female bonding, followed by a discussion of Walker's literary subversion of the European Cinderella Myth in the novel and female creativety, chiefly sewing. Chapter III explores how partiarchy and racism lead to black female sillence and pose a threat to the formation of self-indentity, and analyzes the use of language and the significance of the title of the book and the ending. Affirmatively, Walker succeeds in The Color Purple in portraying her female protagonist's development from a silenced woman to a rebellious one and in asserting female influence through literature.

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening fundamentally share the universal feminist yearning for personal freedom and independence within an oppressive, patriarchal society. With regards to the texts’ stylistic differences and disparate social contexts, their heroines seek to ideologically oppose social rules and conventions for women without achieving the same results. This difference lies in the fact that Chopin’s text fosters the traditional feminism embraced by the majority culture, while Walker’s text makes use of womanism. The availability and authenticity of feminine space for the generation of women’s culture also determine the extent of changes achieved.

Color (sub)Conscious explores the African American female's experience with colorism. Divided into three distinct sections. The first section is a literary analysis of such works as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker's "If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?" an essay from her collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. The second section is a research project based on data gathered from 12 African American females willing to share their own experiences and insights on colorism. The final section is a creative non-fiction piece of the author's own personal pain growing up and living with the lasting effects of colorism.

This thesis explores the psycho-socio-cultural dynamics that surrounded black womanhood in antebellumGeorgia. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews depicted the plight of enslaved black women through a womanist lens and second, to discover what political and socio-cultural constructions enabled the severe slave institution that was endemic toGeorgia. Womanist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma theory are addressed in this study to focus on antebellum or pre-Civil WarGeorgia.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University of Pennsylvania. / Includes bibliographical references.

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NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)