Multiply Voiced, Multiply Heard: Double-Voiced Discourse in Toni Morrison, Maryse Conde, and Nuruddin Farah

• Main Author: Standage, Misty Lynn
• Format: Others
• Published: OpenSIUC 2011
• Subjects: Bakhtin; Conde; double-voiced; Farah; intertextual; Morrison
• Online Access: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/408; https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1408&context=dissertations

This dissertation examines the imaginative ways in which three postcolonial writers overcome a fractured collective past by creating a double-voiced discourse narrative framework that allows them to envision a reality that might-have-been while acknowledging the presence of dominant discourses that are. Morrison, Condé, and Farah overlap contradictory forms in order to show that narrative boundaries are self-imposed, mythical, and arbitrary. Intersection among these differing narratives in each text creates dialogism--a balance between dominant and counter-discourse. Because the contrasting viewpoints of dominant and counter-discourse both have a historical perspective, Morrison, Condé, and Farah work to retain a delicate intertextual fabric in their novels--a fabric woven from several narratives to create a text that rests paradoxically on the task of revealing the narrative contradictions while also showing that they can't be completely separated from each other as the singular hegemonic voice argues.