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Implications Of A Feminist Narratology: Temporality, Focalization And Voice In The Films Of Julie Dash, Mona Smith And Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Jennifer Alyce Machiorlatti

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation conducts feminist narrative textual analysis of films by three independent women film-makers-of- color: Julie Dash, Mona Smith and Trinh T. Minh-ha. The research utilizes traditional cinematic narratological methods combined with a feminist perspective. Narratology is the structural/textual study of narrative organization, style and content. Feminism is a theoretical body of inquiry which lends implications of gender difference, power relationships, cinematic stereotypes, and cultural significance to textual analysis. Feminist inquiry contributes a social, cultural, ideological and historical perspective to the taxomony of a structuralist narrative methodology. By combining this contextual perspective with a topological textual method, I propose consideration …