The Silencing Effect of Canonicity
Authorship and the Written Word in Amy Tan's Novels
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4934452 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lisa Marie Schifano Dunick (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 3-20 |
| Publication date | 2006-03-01 |
| 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/31.2.3 |
| OpenAlex | W2093546906 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 6 |
In the past twenty years, novels such as Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and works by an array of African American women writers have become relatively common occurrences on university syllabi. The inclusion of these female authored texts is often a function of their difference from the grand narratives of American literature. University instructors and literary critics alike have tended to highlight traditionally oral forms of narration, especially women's oral story-telling, found in many of these ethnic women's texts as equal to the traditional grand narratives of Western literature. While the attention given to these authors has broadened our definitions and understanding of what we consider literary, it has at the same time highlighted these authors' difference to such an extent that they remain always in some respect outside of or in opposition to a traditional conception of the canon. In some cases, the effect of this limitation has been to valorize texts that fit into the neat models of what writing by ethnic American authors should do and has relegated writers who do not fit into these models to the outskirts of our critical interest. Thus, certain writers become naturalized as intrinsically important, while others are relegated to the realm of the popular.' In the realm of Asian American women's literature, we can see this exclusionary effect in discussions about Amy Tan's works. The criticism about Tan's works centers on the way that the
Art · Linguistics · Literature · Word (group theory) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · History · Philosophy · Postmodernism in Literature and Education · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies
| Citations per year | 0.27 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2023 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |