Qualifying margins: The discourse of death in Native and African American women's fiction.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the theoretical discourse surrounding the margin/center debate in Literary Criticism, with a special emphasis on the intersection of varying critical voices in this arena and the relative power lodged in these discursive fields. The primary goal is to not merely invoke the margin, but to actually move into what several critics have defined as marginal space--to explore those marginal experiences where power and danger is unleashed. This is actualized in the discourse between the living and the dead in the novels of Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Zora Neale Hurston and Linda Hogan. Focus in the dissertation is on Morrison's Beloved, Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Hogan's Mean Spirit. The ultimate goal is to reach a discursive space of all-margin, where discourse is not confined to those who actually have the ability and power to speak.