The Recovery of History as a Dialogic Process

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 27 http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik) course: Contemporary African-American Fiction language: English abstract: As the winner of the 1982 PEN-Faulkner Prize1 and being acclaimed byfiction writers and by popular and scholarly writers alike DavidBradley's The Chaneysville Incident could establish itself as an importantpiece of contemporary literature. Therefore a considerable number ofentries and textual analyses exists meanwhile whereas the themepeculiarly central within the studies is the novel's exemplary relevance forAfrican-American historiographic metafiction (this term was introducedby Linda Hutcheon in her book A Poetics of Postmodernism). The basicsubject of the novel concerns the protagonist's John Washington'sreconstruction of his past and thus the process of his change in dealingwith (African-American) history.However within this work this perspective has to be broadened in thesense that Judith Powell John's white lover should shift much more intofocus. It is to be proved that Judith's role in the novel is extraordinarilynecessary to enable the process John is undergoing for her interaction as apersistent and sensitive lover is the key to a mutual understanding.Prerequisites for a profound scrutiny of this claim are required; weneed to know what exactly is the way John approaches history and if thatis changing but also what is he able of at which stage of the novel? Whichrole do racial and other individual aspects play in John's past and how dothey influence the present?Relating to potential answers we will go on by having a close look onthe relationship of John and Judith especially on the kind of their dialogicinteraction. Furthermore Judith's part in this process has to be emphasisedto work out her key function by finding out how she interferes how shesucceeds and why it is e