Leen, Catherine
(2011)
Stories from the “Hem of Life”:
Contesting Marginality in Sandra Cisneros’s
The House on Mango Street and
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
In:
Critical Insights: The House on Mango Street.
Salem Press.
ISBN 9781587657177
Abstract
With the publication of the twenty-fifth anniversary editions of The
House on Mango Street in 2009 and The Bluest Eye in 1993, Sandra
Cisneros and Toni Morrison both wrote essays for the new editions in
which they look back on their first novels. Cisneros recalls that, as a
twenty-three-year-old aspiring writer, her aim was to “write stories that
ignore borders between genres, between written and spoken, between
highbrow literature and children’s nursery rhymes, between New York
and the imaginary village of Macondo, between the U.S. and Mexico”
(xvi-xvii). Cisneros refers to a Mexican and Pan-Latin American heritage
as the inspiration for her work, although her main intent was to
communicate her experience as a Mexican American woman growing
up in Chicago through language that transcends literary conventions
and political borders. Similarly, in her essay, Morrison discusses her attempts
to portray her distinct culture through her writing, commenting
on her bid to articulate her meditation on internalized racism by means
of a narrative that both reached and represented her community. Morrison
notes that her use of a distinctive language “as well as my attempt
to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity
and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy
of the culture” (172).
| Item Type: |
Book Section
|
| Keywords: |
Stories from the “Hem of Life”:
Contesting Marginality; Sandra Cisneros;
The House on Mango Street; Toni Morrison; The Bluest Eye; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures > Spanish |
| Item ID: |
10271 |
| Depositing User: |
Catherine Leen
|
| Date Deposited: |
04 Dec 2018 12:27 |
| Publisher: |
Salem Press |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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