The novelistic genre acquires its full nobility through its dynamic capacity to overcome any canonical forms, incorporating intertexts that belong to other discursive fields. It is a genre with no real borders –its heterogeneous and rhizomic identity corroborates its rebellious and conquering feature. Decrying conformism and traditional mimetic sectarianism, that genre renews its borders by appropriating innovative narrative techniques, consisting of interweaving literary, mythical, cultural, and biblical values. By imbricating those intergeneric or interdiscursive figures, Paule Marshall’s fiction illustrates itself as a crucible of extratextual and complex resources. Through their combination, a poetics of heterogeneity emerges, thus generating a semantic shift, which ranges from spiritual trend to cultural one. The “Annual Excursion,” which is thematized in Praisesong for the Widow, offers a substantial and spiritual way out for a cultural reconnection and wholeness –black characters who are involved in that journey to the homeland, construct their cultural identity, connect themselves with their ancestors’ past, and restore their tarnished image. They also promise faithfulness to the “Old Parents.” In return, the latter undertakes to provide the “Out-Islanders” with spiritual and cultural protection to them. That metaphorical, spiritual covenant, which is anchored in the book of Deuteronomy, is far from being pointless or accidental, for it embodies both spiritual and cultural stakes, which the current study aims to scrutinize through the lens of the semiotics of culture. For that purpose, two points will be considered, namely “metaphorizing black ancestors’ requirements” and “the cultural scope of the spiritual covenant.
Like various other African-American female writers’ fictional works, Paule Marshall’s creative art is anchored in her triple roots (American, African and Barbadian). She thematizes countless sociocultural phenomena narrowly related to her ancestral background. Substantively, her novel titled Praisesong for the Widow embodies some analeptic narrative devices, which revitalize her community’s painful cultural experiences. With a pronounced passion for literature, she mingles, on the one hand, historical facts with fictional ones, black dialect with English, and on the other hand, fictionalizes tales, myths, legends, proverbs, and songs. Her literary imagination teems with some noteworthy extratextual values connected with the African, Caribbean and American societies. Those geographical spaces are mainly inhabited by the African descents. Deported during the colonial period, the latter’s ancestors take with them some of their African values, such as language, religion, and many other substantial traditional/cultural practices. The change of environment favors the implantation of that legacy in America and elsewhere. However, over centuries, those inherited resources undergo the impact of the values pertaining to the host spaces, thus provoking a cultural bereavement/alteration or shock whose immediate repercussion is known as acculturation. The longer this sway persists, the more Blacks suffer from diverse crises. With no instant palliative measures, which can enable them to fight against the exotic cultural domination, each of Marshall’s fictional beings deems it necessary to return to their ancestors’ benchmarks for a whole restoration of their “lost self”. In terms of aesthetic scope, the novel under consideration breaks with a number of artistic traditions. The subversion of some of the canonical norms and interweaving of linguistic devices, colonial facts, mythical, legendary, proverbial, ancestral figures, epitomize that rupture and desire for innovation. An in-depth study of those textual clues will therefore contribute to bringing out the significance of the author’s literary vision. To achieve those objectives, the criticism of postmodernism will serve as the methodological framework. Its principles will help to scrutinize both intergeneric devices, and hybrid/pacifist practices.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0073/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>
L’Amérique a été peuplée par vagues migratoires. Constituée originellement de tribus amérindiennes, son caractère identitaire homogène a, au fil des années, fait place à l’hétérogénéité culturelle. Si les raisons de ce flux migratoire restent variées, il faut tout de même admettre qu’il a fait éclore une dynamique culturelle que la littérature migrante hispano-américaine promeut comme modèle. Dans How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) de Julia Alvarez, la société américaine est dépeinte comme un espace de refuge pour une famille dominicaine forcée à l’exil. Au-delà de l’hospitalité apparente offerte à cette famille, ses membres doivent faire face à des difficultés d’adaptation et d’intégration qui sont l’apanage des exilés. Mieux, le contact culturel qui advient dans ce contexte, s’accompagne d’une altération et d’un enrichissement culturels pourvoyeurs de significativité qu’il est besoin d’interroger sous l’angle de la sémiotique de la culture. À cet effet, deux « points-valeurs » sont considérés, à savoir l’épreuve de l’exil et la médiation culturelle.
Self-esteem, individual accomplishment, instant response to social difficulties, and the rejection of alienating uniformity are some of the ideals that the hypermodern era claims as its own. Under that order of expansionist and excessive renewal, various fields of knowledge undergo an extraordinary mutation. The novels whose analysis falls to the current study appropriate that new order and enrich it in their own way by textualizing human societies or creating others from scratch in which voice is given to active female characters, who successfully disregard the old norms by inventing others, which trace the furrows of a paritary or egalitarian relationship, and which contributes, at the same time, to their economic independence and socio-cultural advancement. For example, Paule Marshall and Léonora’s imaginations are a crucible of extratextual and original values anchored in a plural leadership whose prevailing and common trend remains feminist. Considering the characteristics of that tendency, a number of convergent and divergent points whose aesthetic scope seems to have not hitherto been much studied, emerge. For this purpose, it is essential to elucidate it from a comparative perspective. But, to achieve this, it is appropriate to use the operational properties of hypermodernity in order to examine two "points-valeurs", inter alia, the construction of hypermodern characters’ identity, the reversals of hypermodernity and its "effet-idéologie".
Humans and nature remain bound to each other. Defined by the Holy Scriptures as divine creatures, both of those beings maintain certain equality anchored in spirituality, thus substantiating their relationship of consubstantiality and interdependence. Today where deviationist practices threaten nature and humans’ lives, that spiritual bearing should be maintained. It is more relevant than ever to reinforce it and avoid perilous situations, which can destroy them all. Through a warning word, writers such as Paule Marshall have not only textualized their experience of childhood and that of adulthood, they have also fictionalized their cultural roots. One is rural, and the other is urban; the former provides peaceful life to its Barbadian population thanks to its virgin nature. As to the latter, it offers controversial living conditions to Americans. In truth, it pollutes and degrades the American environment, endangering the citizens’ lives. Published in 1967, To Da-Duh, in Memoriam[1] is a consciousness-raiser whose aesthetic scope transcends its former context and crystalizes in the first half of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, it thematizes the splendor and vitality of Barbadian flora, its harmony with its population, and praises the wonders of nature. On the other hand, it depicts the greatness of American civilization through the realistic picture of the skyscrapers (architecture) and the impact of industrialization on nature. That double fictional representation is of paramount interest, for it raises issues about the responsibility of developing and developed countries in the management of their own environment. Through an ecocritical lens, the current study will bring out the semantic network, which emerges from the picture of space.
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