Video Watching Assignment #3: Watch 20 minutes of the video Search for Identity and take notes. When you are done, post your notes here.
Video Authors:
Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros
Who's Interviewed:
Mary Pat Brady, professor of English (Cornell University); Patricia Chu, associate professor of English (George Washington University); Sandra Cisneros, award-winning author and poet
Points Covered:
• Explains how women writers in the 1970s through the 1990s blurred genres (fiction and nonfiction, novels and short stories) to tell their stories.
• Connects feminist and identity movements in the 1970s and 1980s to parallel developments in literature, and explains that as women gained more political and social power, their writing also garnered more respect.
• Shows how these later writers recovered largely forgotten women writers from the past (e.g., Zora Neale Hurston) to establish a women's literary tradition.
• Addresses the challenges for ethnically diverse writers of describing their communities truthfully and questioning dominant beliefs while still identifying with these communities.
• Shows how these writers used their communities' storytelling techniques, primarily the oral tradition, in their own fiction.
• Analyzes how these writers tried to separate myths about womanhood from lived realities.
• Shows how Kingston and Cisneros drew inspiration from their own lives to write fiction that would bring attention to the needs of their communities. Also expresses their desires to "give something back" to their communities, or to return one day to help those who could not leave.
• Defines postmodern narrative and feminism.
Preview
• Preview the video: Inspired by the civil rights movement, the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s challenged established conceptions of what it meant to be American. Partly because such works as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique sold many more copies than publishers had anticipated, literary critics and readers began to take the work of women writers more seriously in the 1960s and 1970s. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior inspired other women writers grappling with issues of feminine, American, and ethnic identity. Like Kingston, Sandra Cisneros portrayed in her work characters the reading public had never before encountered. These representations challenged mainstream society's definitions of women and of American identity. Like other "postmodern" writers of the period, Kingston and Cisneros experimented with form and blurred genres. A mixture of fiction and autobiography characterizes their best-known works.
• What to think about while watching: What is identity? What does it mean to have a dynamic rather than a rigid identity? What does it mean to say that identity is a process? How might this idea conflict with preexisting ideas about identity? What is postmodern narrative? What writing styles did these authors use and why? What does it mean to "translate" one culture's stories into the language of another culture? How did female writers challenge the meaning of being American? What does it mean to be a woman in America? How can books help women readers to realize the options available to them? How did minority women writers complicate mainstream views of their communities while also questioning these communities' dominant beliefs? What risks did these writers take in telling their stories?
Photo: Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) was a 17th-century midwife who taught the Antinomian heresy that God could be reached directly and without the assistance of a minister. She was put on trial and excommunicated from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She later gave birth to a stillborn, misshapen child--further proof, some said, of her affiliation with the Devil. She has come to represent freedom of speech and is sometimes labeled America's first feminist.
+of+Rima.jpg)
* Many American women wrote before the women liberation movement, but people did not deal with that writing seriously. After that, when American women took their rights, people started to respect the writing of women. Maxine Kingston was a Chinese writer, she wrote about the idea of identity, she wrote about her family in china and America, and the different between them. Kingston used her experience, fiction, and what her mother told her. She used that in her writing to define what is the identity, homeland, and what America is. Many people criticize her because she wrote about everything in the society, not just the positive point but also about the negative points. Sandra Cisneros was a Mexican writer, she also discusses the idea of identity in her writing, she wrote about feminist identity. In her writing she encourages women to be free and to don’t be a follower to men. The main character in her book “the house in the mango street” is a girl who doesn’t want to be as her mother or other women in her city, she want to learn and be important person. In the video many women appear with her children as if the only job for woman is to look after her children and she can not produce or do any other useful thing. These writers had a great responsibility to talk instead or in the name of many women who can not talk or express their opinions. They also proved another model of good life which woman can live and produce new things.
ReplyDeleteThis video titled "Search for identity" shows that after the Vietnam War, many writers emerged from the margins of society to the forefront of American literature. Among these were women who challenged social definitions and explored the idea of identity. The Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970's was an important turning point in the lives of many American women. Many women looked for answers to complicated questions about what it meant to be an American. Women were writing great novels but were never considered seriously in the way men's work was considered seriously. However, with new freedom that was given to women to define themselves, many writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros wrote about their own experiences. They put characters never seen in mainstream American literature, and they started exploring new identity. It was not thought of identity as a single act but as a process. Many postmodern writers began to blur genres mixing fiction, history, and autobiography to tell stories about their lives. They were taking pieces of their experiences to create an identity. *** In her book, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts," Maxine Kingston fictionalized her own life experiences to question the belief of both the dominant American culture and her Chinese-American community. Part of her struggle was the untranslatability and the difficulty in moving between English and Chinese. Kingston retails her mother's stories using facts, myths, and her own experiences. She uses different narrative techniques and forms to negotiate identity. Her story ends with an argument between Maxine and her mother. Maxine decides that she had to validate her own truth, since her mother will not give her what she wanted. Maxine was criticized by the men in her Chinese-American community because of her critique of patriarchy in her culture.*** Other writers grappling with issues of identity were influenced by Maxine's "The Woman Warrior." For example, Sandra Cisneros wrote a novel called "The House on Mango Street." The 1980's was an era of racial strife in which African-American men and Latinos were put in prisons at higher percentages than ever. Many women of color felt alienated by a feminist movement that didn't always pay attention to issues important to them. "The Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color" was published by Cherri Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. They considered this book a revolutionary tool. Sandra Cisneros, like Kingston, fight her cultures oppression of women. The characters in her novel create new identities. Cisneros doesn't want to be like other women in her society. She says how can I be Mexican, retain my cultural identity and form something new. The main character in the novel is a young Mexican-American looking for her place in the world. This girl looks at the oppressed women in her society, and she says I don't want to be one of them. She is looking for a feminist identity. She leaves her home to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, but she will go back. It's a responsibility for the ethnic writer to go back and speak for the ones who cannot go out. By doing so, she wants us to understand that she is not escaping, but she is providing another kind of model for living.
ReplyDelete