http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/39434691

The body of evidence--reading the scar as text : Williams, Morrison, Baldwin, and Petry

My dissertation investigates the ways the body's surface is used to produce speech through the act of scarring. I argue that the act and production of scarring serves as a site for the active writing and re-writing of personal, communal, and historical moments in society. In addition, I posit that the scarring of the bodily text is not only an external (physical) act of production, it is also an internally (psychological) active production. My study pushes the boundaries between the physical and the psychological, intimating a space, a "borderland" site that allows scarred individuals the opportunity for movement in and out of the static categorical modes of expression created by one's immediate environment or society as a whole. I show that the body offers illuminative and innovative ways of critiquing certain silences which appear in African American and American literatures. By analyzing the theories of phenomenology posited by Gaston Bachelard and building on the work on the question of the African American voice by critics such as Valerie Smith, Mae Henderson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Alice Walker, I contend that people speak through the use of inanimate objects (rooms, houses, tables), and through the use of masses (water, bodily fluids, the earth). My concern is that silence isn't really silence when you can listen and interpret the wider spectrum of expression. Furthermore, one's ability to interpret these expressions rests upon one's ability to investigate the ingenuous way some literary characters "say what's on their mind" without speaking at all.

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