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Full-Text Articles in Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
Where Am I? Who Am I? The Problem Of Location And Recognition In Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors , Joanne Gass
Where Am I? Who Am I? The Problem Of Location And Recognition In Helena Parente Cunha's Woman Between Mirrors , Joanne Gass
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Helena Parente Cunha's novel, Woman Between Mirrors explores the many ways in which a dominant and domineering patriarchy can and does impose itself upon its subjects through what Louis Althusser calls interpellation. Parente Cunha's woman, a true twentieth-century heroine, faces her divided self—a self determined by ideology—and begins a quest which will end when she becomes an "I" before her shattered mirrors. But before that can happen, she must author herself, and, in the process of writing herself, she must overcome the demons of location and recognition. In the material sense, the woman must locate herself geographically, historically, socially, and …
A Clear-Sighted Witness: Trauma And Memory In Maryse Condé'S Desirada, Dawn Fulton
A Clear-Sighted Witness: Trauma And Memory In Maryse Condé'S Desirada, Dawn Fulton
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Maryse Condé's 1997 novel recounts a young Guadeloupean woman's frustrating search for the identity of her father. Because the information she seeks is initially guarded by her mother and later contradicted by friends and family, this heroine confronts an epistemological impasse, a potentially traumatic event to which she will never have direct access. Informed by Toni Morrison's reflections on memory and invention and by recent studies in trauma theory, this essay examines the ways in which Condé negotiates this impasse in her novel, creating a narrative field of knowledge that allows for its own lacunae and maintains multiple registers of …