Ethical Engagement: Critical Strategies for Approaching Autoethnographic Fiction

Abstract

Critics of American literature need ways to ethically interpret ethnic difference, particularly in analyses of texts that memorialize collective experiences wherein that difference is a justification for large-scale atrocity. By examining fictionalized autoethnographies--narratives wherein the author writes to represent his or her own ethnic group as a collective identity in crisis--this dissertation interrogates audiences' responses and authors' impetus for reading and producing novels that testify to experiences of cultural trauma. The first chapter synthesizes some critical strategies specific to autoethnographic fiction; the final three chapters posit a series of textual applications of those strategies. Each textual application demonstrates that outsider readers and critics can treat testimonial literatures with respect and compassion while still analyzing them critically. In the second chapter, an explication of the representations of African American women's experiences with the cultural trauma of slavery is brought to bear upon analyses of Toni Morrison's A Mercy (2009) and Alice Walker's Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2003). In the third chapter, the debate between nationalist and cosmopolitanist critics in Native literary studies is adjudicated through a close reading of the same-sex desire between adolescent boys, and histories of land theft and broken treaties in Craig Womack's Drowning in Fire (2001) and Sherman Alexie's Flight (2007). Finally, the application of theoretical strategies for reading testimonio to literary texts is used to explore the long term effects of the Trujillato on the personal and national identity of people from the Haitian-Dominican-American diaspora as portrayed in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones (1998). Each chapter demonstrates the potential of autoethnographic narrative techniques to present didactic messages, which serve a memorializing function for insider readers and aid outsider readers in understanding those insider perspectives.