North American Women Writers Week 9 Challenge to genre and form

Hybrid genres Talk-story and oral tradition mixed with autobiography Vignettes and autobiography

Wendy Ho, In her mother’s house Writing on The Joy Luck Club’s form: An arrhythmic, fragmented telling is common in talk-stories which incorporate a “complicated vocabulary of rupture—heavy sighs, silences, trembling lips, downcast eyes, weeping and wringing of hands” (19)

Marina Heung Writing on JLC: The transmission of stories about loss and social upheaval produces “parables of self-affirmation and individual empowerment” (607).

House on Mango Street (1984) 'If you take Mango Street and translate it, it's Spanish. The syntax, the sensibility, the diminutives, the way of looking at inanimate objects—that's not a child's voice as is sometimes said. That's Spanish! I didn't notice that when I was writing it.' Cisneros, Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (1992).

'I wanted to write stories that were a cross between poetry and fiction—[I] wanted to write a collection which could be read at any random point without having any knowledge of what came before or after.' (Cisneros)

Aural characteristic of narrative “And then she died, my aunt who listened to my poems. And then we began to dream the dreams.” 61 “When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping. When I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at the trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be.” 75 Also p 108, “A house of my own”

Manipulating representation of time 3 levels of ‘time” Jazz Annie John Woman Warrior

Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time” Cyclical Monumental Linear

Cyclical Time The biological rhythm of the woman’s body imposes temporality (puberty-womanhood-menopause) which, when in harmony with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, causes harmony and jouissance. Cyclical time = Maternal time

Monumental Time It is “all encompassing and infinite like imaginary space” Monumental time = Eternal time

Linear Time Masculine The time of history The time of “language considered the enunciation of sentences (noun+verb; topic-comment; beginning-ending) and that this time rests on its own stumbling block, which is also the stumbling block of that enunciation—death”.

Cited References Wendy Ho. In her mother’s house—the politics of Asian-American mother-daughter writing. Walnut Creek, Calif,: Alta-Mira Press, 1999. Marina Heung. “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club.” Feminist Studies, 19.3, Fall 1993 (597-616).