Multiply Voiced, Multiply Heard: Double-Voiced Discourse in Toni Morrison, Maryse Conde, and Nuruddin Farah

This dissertation examines the imaginative ways in which three postcolonial writers overcome a fractured collective past by creating a double-voiced discourse narrative framework that allows them to envision a reality that might-have-been while acknowledging the presence of dominant discourses that are. Morrison, Condé, and Farah overlap contradictory forms in order to show that narrative boundaries are self-imposed, mythical, and arbitrary. Intersection among these differing narratives in each text creates dialogism--a balance between dominant and counter-discourse. Because the contrasting viewpoints of dominant and counter-discourse both have a historical perspective, Morrison, Condé, and Farah work to retain a delicate intertextual fabric in their novels--a fabric woven from several narratives to create a text that rests paradoxically on the task of revealing the narrative contradictions while also showing that they can't be completely separated from each other as the singular hegemonic voice argues.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Campus Only Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year

2011

Author dc:creator

• Standage, Misty Lynn

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fox, Robert

• Bakhtin
• Conde
• double-voiced
• Farah
• intertextual
• Morrison

Repository record dc:identifier

https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/408

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:opensiuc.lib.siu.edu:dissertations-1408