Signifying the Self: Cultural Trauma and Mechanisms of Memorialization in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Ana Țăranu
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Abstract

Starting from Hirsch and Smith’s concept of a feminist counterhistory and referencing the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this paper undertakes a (re)reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as construction of gendered countermemory. Such an interpretation would enable a recognition of the political function of the novel as an identity matrix of African-American womanhood. Expanding upon the classical, post-Lacanian approach to trauma studies and its post-colonial reconfigurations, I use a poststructuralist framing of collective trauma, and the Saussurian concept of signification, to highlight the struggle for self-determination of an oppressed community as it is signified-upon by its oppressors through violently imposed discourse. I further question the complicity between conventional forms of narration and the hegemony of an external signifier, and I trace this patterned mechanism of aggression within the linguistic and diegetic fabric of the novel, in order to expose Hurston’s literary methodology of collective memorialization and the way it challenges canonical representations of trauma.
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自我的意义——佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿《他们的眼睛在看上帝》中的文化创伤与记忆机制
本文从赫希和史密斯的女权主义反历史概念出发,参照文化创伤的理论框架,对佐拉·尼尔·赫斯顿的《他们的眼睛在看上帝》进行了重读,认为这是性别反记忆的建构。这样的解读将使人们认识到小说作为非裔美国女性身份矩阵的政治功能。在后拉康主义的创伤研究方法及其后殖民地重建的基础上,我使用了集体创伤的后结构主义框架和索绪尔意义概念,来强调被压迫社区的自决斗争,因为它是由压迫者通过暴力强加的话语来指示的。我进一步质疑传统叙事形式与外部能指霸权之间的共谋,并在小说的语言和语言结构中追踪这种模式化的攻击机制,以揭露赫斯特集体记忆的文学方法及其挑战创伤典型表征的方式。
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来源期刊
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory Arts and Humanities-Arts and Humanities (all)
CiteScore
0.90
自引率
0.00%
发文量
15
审稿时长
7 weeks
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