Articulate Silences : Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Kogewa / King-Kok Cheung.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cheung, King-Kok, author.

Series:

Reading Women Writing

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kogawa, Joy--Criticism and interpretation.

Yamamoto, Hisaye--Criticism and interpretation.

Kingston, Maxine Hong--Criticism and interpretation.

Asian Americans in literature.

Asian American women in literature.

Asian American women--Intellectual life.

Asian American women.

American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

Women and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

American literature--Asian American authors--History and criticism.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 198 pages)

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that suppresses the voicing of minority experiences. Yet at the same time, they demonstrate how silences-voiceless gestures, textual ellipses, authorial hesitations-can themselves be articulate. Drawing on theoretical works on women's writing, on ethnicity and race, and on postmodernism and history, Cheung takes issue with Anglo-American feminists who valorize speech unequivocally and with revisionist Asian American male critics who attempt to refute Orientalist stereotypes by renouncing silence. She challenges Eurocentric views of speech and silence as polarized, hierarchical, and gendered, and proposes an approach to Asian American literature which overturns the "East-West" or "dual personality" model. Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa interweave speech and silence, narration and ellipses, autobiography and fiction as they adapt and recast Asian and Euro-American precursors. Drawing freely from both traditions, they reinvent the past by decentering, disseminating, and interrogating authority-but not by reappropriating it. A fresh and subtle response to issues relating to cultural diversity, Articulate Silences will be important reading for scholars and students in the fie,4s of literary theory and criticism, women's studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Terminology

1. Introduction

2. Rhetorical Silence: "Seventeen Syllables," "Yoneko's Earthquake," and "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara"

3. Provocative Silence: The Woman Warrior and China Men

4. Attentive Silence: Obasan

Coda

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-188) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

1-5017-2112-7

OCLC:

1080551025