A Toast to Mr. Smiles
Chiasmus and Comitragedy in Suzan-Lori Parks's Signified Faulkner
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11271973 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Leise (Whitman College), E Gold (Buffalo State University) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 137-157 |
| Publication date | 2015-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlv002 |
| OpenAlex | W2154041038 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
Although critics initially praised Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body for its raucous plot and seemingly happy ending, this essay instead sees Parks’s only novel to date as a kind of literary confidence game. Roping her reader in with humor and a familiarly stable denouement , her story in fact chiastically reverses plot elements of William Faulkner’s 1930 tragicomedy. In this way, it writes a kind of comic-tragedy: that is, a story bearing the hallmarks of a literary comedy, but which ultimately papers over a deeper tragedy. In reversing the plot-line of Faulkner’s now canonical novel, Parks draws attention away from As I Lay Dying’s central ruminations on language and being, and instead calls out the more pressing crisis at the book’s end: the fact that Dewey Dell ends up pregnant, unmarried, and without access to reproductive healthcare choices. Setting her novel in 1963 Texas, Parks connects the dots from across the past century to highlight how movement on women’s reproductive rights have remained tragically stagnant while simultaneously questioning the stubbornly enduring association between masculinity and economic individualism.
Smiles rearrangement · Stereochemistry · American and British Literature Analysis · Chemistry · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Literature: history, themes, analysis
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |