Candles lighting the dark

With the help of Bakhtin, one can begin to understand and describe in some detail those mechanisms by which Howe achieves her goal of resurrecting the voices of those who have up to this point been confined to the history's wastelands. In The Birth-mark, Howe gathers together individuals and chronotopes in the space of her essay where she engages them in a conversation, in a dialogue that realizes a heteroglossia, a panoply of voices intermingling with Howe's own, and with the aid of her poetry, authoritative and monoglossic, understood as an always antinomian act, Howe opens up a space for those voices that have been lost deep within (or altogether excluded from) the archive, and in so doing, she gives them a way into the world, for in her essay, the reader comes to know these voices and to speak to them (as the reader has known and spoken to those who have lived long in the conversation and the light) and thus give them life

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