This thesis examines the role that dialogue and community play in the autobiographical enterprise and argues that autobiographer and community are dialogically interrelated. The central idea that governs Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Smaro Kamboureli's in the second person, and Minnie Bruce Pratt's "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," is this: life-writing cannot be divorced from dialogical relations because living cannot be divorced from dialogical relations. Accordingly, if it is impossible to conceive and define ourselves without reference to other selves, it must be equally impossible to write our life-stories without reference to others. Hence, the process of "self-invention" or "self-fashioning" typically associated with the autobiographical project must be reconsidered within the larger frame of history and heritage, community and collaboration.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.69618 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Marinos, Angela |
| Contributors | Bristol, Michael (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001386556, proquestno: AAIMM91677, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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