• Migratory Dialectics and Border Semiosis in Ana Castillo’s Chicana Novel So Far from God

    Author(s):
    Judy Bertonazzi (see profile)
    Date:
    2017
    Group(s):
    LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American, LLC Chicana and Chicano, LSL Linguistics and Literature, Postcolonial Literature, TM Literary and Cultural Theory
    Subject(s):
    Aesthetics, American literature, Poetics, Semiotics
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    discourse analysis, embodiment, geography, languages, migration, Epistemology
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M68222
    Abstract:
    My paper argues for a shift in our theoretical focus on time in narrative dialectics and a post-Barthesian semiotic model for critical interpretations of Latino/a/x border narratives. Currently, we know that border narratives reveal the underlying patterns of literary communicative acts of difference (i.e., oral and literary ambiguity, high contextuality, and incommensurability) and how these acts of difference are aesthetically arranged for border texts. I claim that these acts of expressing socio-linguistic realities can be made explicit and aesthetically felt when reading border literature. Most scholarship on U.S. multi-ethnic novels, including Latino/a/x novels, has performed rhetorical analyses of the relations and incongruities between Western and non-Western narrative forms. This is evident in Ramón Saldívar’s 1990 narrative theory of a “dialectics of difference.” His theory of Chicano narrativity provides the basis for the development of a critical method for determining the intersecting referential codes used to express border narrative literary elements. A migratory dialectic theory and border semiosis theory will establish the macro- and micro- structures of border narrative difference for further research of border narratives. In this paper, I will examine Castillo’s novel as an example of a border narrative that creates the aesthetic rendering of border thinking. Border thinking is invoked in So Far from God through linguistic heterogeneity, multiple referential codes in dialectical convergences, and dialectic practices needed for ideologically transformed characters and ultimately for the novel’s readers.
    Notes:
    This file is the most recent version of my research work as of April 29, 2017. It has not been modified for upload to MLA's Core Repository.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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