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Transforming subjects: Readings of Toni Morrison, Judy Grahn, Leslie Feinberg, and Leslie Marmon Silko
Abstract
The novels of Morrison, Grahn, Feinberg, and Silko offer vibrant, powerful, and provocative reading experiences; they also present visions of effective, engaged, and politically viable identity and subjectivity in the wake of deconstruction. I begin with Toni Morrison's Sula as a way to explore the context of contemporary fiction and thought; the character Sula can be seen as a "prototypical" (post)modern subject: decentered, foundationless, disruptive of "traditional" thinking, uncategorizable. I then look at Judy Grahn's Mundane's World, Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, arguing that they all point to ways in which a (post)modern subject can be functional and politically productive--these texts acknowledge a pervasive fluidity but insist on agency and responsibility. Grahn, Feinberg, and Silko deal with questions raised by Morrison's work and by contemporary theory, questions addressed by such theorists as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Emmanuel Levinas, about how we can and should conceive of subjectivity and identity and agency in light of (post)modernism. Each of these novelists begins to enact a postdeconstructive subjectivity linguistically, structurally, thematically and narratively which is multiple and liberatory. I explore these movements in their works, learning from my readings and re-readings, finally returning to the theorists mentioned above to trace some parameters of contemporary subjectivity.
Subject Area
American literature|Literature
Recommended Citation
Chapin, John Philip, "Transforming subjects: Readings of Toni Morrison, Judy Grahn, Leslie Feinberg, and Leslie Marmon Silko" (1998). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9902951.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9902951