“Crying for the land”: Modes of representation in Mildred D. Taylor's fiction

Cicely Denean Cobb, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation examines how subjectivity in African American adolescent literature is influenced by forces such as communal ties and kinship and how both individual subject and community are shaped by pressures such as race, gender, time, and place. An emphasis is placed on how Taylor examines the emotional and psychological tensions resulting from life in the segregated South of the 1930s. Moreover, she uses private and public speech to tell a story designed to reach multiple audiences: black as well as white, children as well as young adolescents and adults. This concept has evolved from Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's article, "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition," Mae Gwendolyn Henderson argues that African American women writers' works should be examined for their commentaries on the interrelationship between race and gender. In this dissertation, I argue that Taylor's novels address the four key levels of discourse involving the relation of an individual self to a generalized "other" imagined to exist both outside and within the self. These four levels are: the self in competition with the external other; the self in accord with the external other; the self in competition with an internal other; the self in accord with an internal other. Like Henderson, Taylor suggests the dialogic of difference would include those moments wherein the self is in conflict with the other---external or internal---in a relation that highlights differences while the dialectic of identity emphasizes those moments wherein the relation of the self and the other---external or internal---is characterized by sharing, unity, and a sense of commonality.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Knoeller, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|American studies|African Americans|American literature

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