Dynamics of domination and dialogic narrative strategies in Charles Johnson's «Middle Passage», Richard Power's «The Time of Our Singing», and Lesie Marmon Silko's «Almanac of the Dead»

The dissertation investigates narrative strategies employed by the contemporary American novel to criticize and counteract the dynamics of domination. The study focuses primarily on Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990), Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing (2003), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). These three novels address problems of sociopolitical repression and racial discrimination arising from the preconditions and heritage of colonial rule and the enslavement of Native Americans and African-Americans. While Johnson, Powers, and Silko refer to concrete historical moments, the critique implicit in their novels does not primarily arise from narrated historical facts or fictional experience, but from the narrative configurations they construct, and in which they embed these facts and experiences. They juxtapose naturalized assumptions about fixed meanings of space, temporality, and ensuing notions of self prevailing in the narrated historical past to ever changing combinations of ethnic, cultural, and social belonging within shifting spatial and temporal parameters, until these assumptions become untenable. Their method of exposition is therefore basically dialogic, and the insights that these novels yield constitute a form of knowledge that becomes available precisely through the combination of dialogics and literary narrative. To the degree that previous assumptions still prevail, all three novels provide a critique of the foundations on which members of Western culture across racial and ethnic lines construct their sense of authority within dynamics of power today. Johnson, Powers, and Silko are associated with African American, mainstream American, and Native American literature, or, in the case of Silko, with the field of American women's writing, and yet, while belonging in these subfields of American studies, go beyond and indeed defy such institutional categories in the conceptual reach of their work. Their novels participate

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