The Textualization of Oppression: A Materialist Conception of Morality

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between the narrative imagination and the way social groups see themselves. It works on a corpus of Ethnic short stories whose narrators inhabit the wider hegemonic culture of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community in the United States. Following a poetics based on the main tenets of the Russian Formalist and Poststructuralist schools of literary theory, the analysis relates the social problem depicted in the texts to the discursive devices used in the process of textualization and to the hermeneutic act itself. It attempts an explanation of the construction of meaning through the conception of metaphor of V. Voloshinov as well as through a consideration of the reader's social context. The analysis concludes that the materiality of the oppression suffered by ethnic minority groups is textualized by means of the foregrounding of the historicity of the events in the "fictional worlds" and by the use of a metaphorization of the human body.