Saying the Unsayable: Poethics of Silence in Contemporary North American Novels

Within the context of North American literature, writers from marginalized groups have written alternative histories and offered counter-narratives, in active resistance to the silences that have structured the histories of colonization and cultural exclusion. And yet, just as writers begin to address and give a voice to silenced perspectives in history, Toni Morrison, among others (including Gayatri Spivak and Trinh T. Minh-ha), calls attention to the ineffability of the past, and warns against unquestioning use of language as a natural pathway to justice and empowerment. Literary projects that aspire to bring into words what has been silenced and erased in systems of knowledge production are thus confronted with a paradox – their own medium of coming to voice is coded by the same structures of silencing and exclusion that they set out to resist.

To address this dilemma, this book examines four contemporary North American novels – Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), David Treuer’s Little (1995), Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982). All the four novels are, in their unique and creative ways, aesthetically engaged with the critical debate over the limit of language and the ineffability of experiences such as slavery, war, as well as the loss of life, land and cultural knowledges in the process of colonialization. They all, in one way or another, gravitate toward a strategy of using words to foreground the silence/ ineffability of the past. Approaching silence as both a category of analysis and a category of literary practice, the book explores the aesthetical and ethical implications of silence in the literary effort to articulate what has been lost and erased in the current historical narratives. What’s more, the book examines how a poethics of silence could inform the establishment of a mode of literary representation that allows the unsayable to assert its irreducible presence.

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Im Kontext nordamerikanischer Literatur bieten Schriftsteller*innen aus marginalisierten Gruppen Gegenerzählungen an, um dem Schweigen, das die Kolonialgeschichte der kulturellen Ausgrenzung strukturiert, Widerstand zu leisten. Während diese stillgelegten Perspektiven der Geschichte erstmals angesprochen werden, machen Gayatri Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha und Toni Morrison auf die Unbeschreiblichkeit der Vergangenheit aufmerksam und warnen vor einem unkritischen Umgang mit Sprache als einem vermeintlich natürlichen Weg zu Gerechtigkeit und Ermächtigung.

Literarische Projekte, die den Anspruch erheben, verschwiegene und ausgelöschte Systeme der Wissensproduktion zur Sprache zu bringen, stehen damit vor einem Paradox. Das eigene Medium der Artikulation ist mit den gleichen Strukturen des Schweigens und der Exklusion behaftet, denen es sich eigentlich zu widersetzen versucht.