Patrol went up the mountain. One man came back. He died before he could tell us what happened.

By being "not that kind of story," Herr implies that it is a story apparently without an ending; a story apparently without a meaning. Usually, stories reveal something to the reader or hearer; usually, stories follow an event or characters through to some conclusion; stories are acts of expression from which the hearer can take something away. What makes the soldier's story so poingant to Herr is its ability to mean so much and so little at the same time.

This little episode in Michael Herr's book is powerful because, in part, it reveals how much cultures invest in the acts of telling and hearing stories. In many ways, telling stories is one of our primary means of expressing borders and boundaries: the borders between right and wrong, between truth and fiction, between ourselves and others. Storytelling forms, whether folktales, literary fiction, autobiography, history, or myths, are all ways of expressing these borders, and of expressing cultural and social meaning. Stories are fundamental to our identities because storytelling is basic to all cultures: We hear stories when we're children; we hear stories on the evening news; we tell stories to each other; we read stories in school, and watch them on television and at the movies. Much of the earliest and most influential knowledge we attain is through stories, and indeed throughout our lives we are so saturated in stories that it would be impossible to separate our sense of self from the stories that formed us. Our lives are shaped and held together by the large and small stories that surround us: what a person does and does not believe about religion, how a person thinks of his or her nationality or heritage, what a person knows about her or his family history--what are these things but stories that shape behavior and beliefs?

Individuals derive their sense of identity from their culture, and cultures are systems of belief that determine how people live their lives. Stories are a fundamental means by which that system of beliefs connects the individual to the culture.

The relationship between storytelling, identity, and culture is the central idea behind all of the selections in this chapter. As the cultural critic, Stuart Hall puts it, "Identity is a narrative of the self; it's the story we tell about the self in order to know who we are." Exploring the stories we tell to know who we are is precisely what this chapter is all about.

Because stories are so fundamental to culture they are therefore always embedded in cultural contexts and are always culturally-based. Therefore, whether we know it or not, we use a whole system of cultural information to help us make sense of stories we hear.

Here are the opening sentences of two stories:

(1) Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a king and queen.

(2) WASHINGTON, Aug., 14: Whitehouse sources close to the President revealed today that he would go forward with his economic proposals, despite considerable opposition from Congress.

Similarly, the features in the second example signal that it is a news story. The dateline "WASHINGTON, Aug., 14:", its straightforward style, its factual authority. Just as with the first example, you can recognize the kind of story this is because you have the necessary cultural information to recognize it. In both cases, this recognition sets up certain expectations; the reader thinks that the first story is probably not a true story, and that the second story probably is. In the first example, the time and place are stated vaguely as if they didn't matter. In the second story, the place and time are stated precisely, as if they mattered a great deal. Naturally we don't think consciously about these things when we read: they are just acts of recognition that happen instantly and are part of the reading process that is culturally conditioned. For example, what would you think if you read a story that opened this way:

(3) Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a President who thought he could go forward with his economic proposals despite considerable opposition from Congress.

Our lives are saturated with media and messages that rely on the ability of viewers and readers to recognize basic cultural storytelling codes. For example, "reality-based" crime shows, or made-for-television movies based on "true stories," rely on the viewers' ability to recognize and appreciate the combination of sensational drama and factual reality; music videos that present a storyline that matches the lyrics of the song depend on the ability of viewers to piece together meaningful narratives with minimal information; similarly, a work of autobiography or short fiction depends on our ability to recognize the kind of story being told, even if the context or details are foreign or unfamiliar. Our recognition of these codes and signals are not natural but learned through our culture, and it is our learned cultural knowledge that gives us the ability to recognize what stories are about, what stories mean, indeed even to recognize a story as a story.

Our ability to recognize the codes of cultural stories is one of the important links between our culture and our identity. The stories that we're surrounded with--whether they are stories we have been told, seen on the news, or read in a book--contribute to who we are and form a crucial part of our identity. All of the selections in this chapter deal in various ways with stories that shape lives--either the lives of the writers themselves or of the characters they are writing about.

The first half of this chapter is devoted to people who are concerned with "telling their own story," either through formal autobiography or writing that is somehow autobiographical. Autobiographical writing reveals a lot about the shaping power of stories. When people tell the stories of their own life they often have to remember and recreate the cultural stories that shaped them, figuring out which stories were true and which were false, which stories helped them and which hurt them. Sorting through the shaping power of stories is one of the central themes of autobiographical writing.

One of the things that we learn from writers telling their own story is that self-identity is not a natural and uncomplicated process. A sense of self in not something like a bodily organ, such as heart or liver. It is not as if we are all born with an identity and it just grows as do our bodies; rather, our identities are formed by the world around us. Telling one's own story involves discovering how the multiple communities and contexts surrounding the self have formed it, and often, by this discovery, freeing itself from these forces.

Autobiography is crucially related to storytelling in another way too: it is the act of imposing a narrative form on a full and extensive life. As Jill Ker Conway, an author of her own autobiography, puts it,

Autobiographical narratives are fictions, in the sense that the narrator imposes her or his order on the ebb and flow of experience and gives us a false sense of certainty and finality about causation in life. Yet they are not fictions but accounts of real lives, lived in a specific time and place, windows on the past, chances to enter and inhabit the real world of another person, chances to try on another identity and so broaden our own.

In many ways, closely examining autobiographical writing can help break down the traditional idea that there are only two kinds of writing: true or false, fiction and nonficiton. This chapter asks you to consider that the distinction may not be so clear, to consider that the line between fiction and nonfiction, between reality and the imagination, may be rather blurred indeed.

These are some of the key ideas that are also raised in the second section of this chapter where you will read several different kinds of stories: for example, included here are some traditional oral folktales and then examples of literary fiction inspired by these tales. The cluster of African American folktales, the stories by Ralph Ellison and Charles Chesnutt, and the stories by Leslie Marmon Silko and Sandra Cisneros will give you a sampling of different ways in which some modern and contemporary writers are producing fiction that both preserves and transforms the powerful oral storytelling traditions of African American, Native American and Chicano cultures; these writers all explore the shaping power of stories in their cultures, as well as the interplay between traditional stories of their cultural pasts and the social narratives that affect the lives of Americans in contemporary contexts.

The last two stories by Robert Coover and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are both modern works of fiction that also reflect an interest in the shaping power of stories. Both of these stories are in many ways about social stories that structure our lives, especially in regard to gender and sexuality. Gilman tells the story of a narrator who is at first controlled by gender stereotypes about female behavior and in a sense uses "storymaking" as a means of resistance to that control; Coover's story is concerned with the public nature of our private fantasies, and the blurred lines between our most intimate thoughts and the media images with which our society is saturated.

Overall, the stories in this chapter explore the idea that we are the stories we hear and the stories we tell.

Black Hair
Gary Soto

Unlike the previous essay by bell hooks, which is about the act of writing autobiography, this autobiographical sketch by Gary Soto is an example of how a writer might use the non-fiction story to explore a single, autobiographical episode in his or her life. In this piece, Soto describes his experience of working his first real "city" job. The sketch comes from an autbiographical book of sketches that describes Soto's youth and coming of age in and around the city of Fresno, California, where he was raised. As he describes in the piece, Soto had done farming field work in California's San Joaquin Valley, but his employment at the Valley Tire Factory, as he tells in this story, is an entirely new experience.

As is true of most autobiographical writing, this story frames a single episode in Soto's life within the broader context of his own personal development. Soto has an easy descriptive style that almost makes you forget that each of his characters and details carries on important personal meaning in his life story. source: Gary Soto, Living Up the Street. (Strawberry Hill Press, 1985)

TO DO WHILE READING:

-Pay particular attention to the different people or characters that the narrator meets, and mark in the text places where Soto describes how his encounter with these characters lead him to reflect on his own sense of identity.

REWRITING THE READING:

(1)
In the story "Black Hair," we get the first-person perspective of the narrator describing what it was like to be a newcomer and outsider among several different characters. Choose the perspective of any one of the characters that the narrator describes and write at least a couple of paragraphs (in the first-person voice) describing your observations about the narrator. Use your imagination, but base your description of the narrator on the narrator's own words.
***Be sure and indicate which character you have chosen.

(2)
Throughout the story, the narrator finds himself in a number of different, contrasting "spaces": his place of work, along Mission Road, his room at the Van Deusen's house, to name three. Pick two of these "spaces" and make a list for each, of its physical characteristics and the emotional images that the narrator associates with it.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE READING:

(3)
What do you think is significant about the scene when the narrator runs away with the illegal Mexican immigrants? What does that reveal to us about the narrator's sense of himself at that moment?

(4)
One important scene in the story is when the narrator explores the personal belongings in the room of the Van Deusen's daughter. How do you think this scene is part of the story's meaning? How might you compare this scene to the one mentioned in question #3 when the narrator runs with the Mexican nationals?

WORKING TOWARD SYNTHESIS:

(5)
Soto's autobiographical story is both descriptive and abstract. It is about events and about emotions at the same time. Although he writes with an easy style that seems like he's just telling a story, his is a very careful writer and pays a lot of attention to details and structure.

Write a short paper or journal entry in which you explore how Soto uses narrative description and concrete detail in combination with more emotional and abstract ideas in order to convey whatever meaning he finds in this particular episode in his life. You might, for example, look at those moments when he moves from describing physical activities to descriptions of what he imagines. Or, you might focus on his interaction with different characters.

Another way to think of this question is this: if one of the main purposes of autobiographical writing is to derive some larger meaning from one individual's real life experience, then how does Gary Soto "make meaning" out of this episode of his life?

(6)
Respect and Belonging:
One of the themes explored in Soto s story is that of belonging. Throughout the story, Soto s narrator experiences various feelings of fitting in and not fitting, feeling like an insider or an outsider. In a short paper, discuss how Soto explores ideas like belonging, respect, or isolation. Is there some kind of progression or change throughout the epsiode? What are some of details or techniques that he uses to explore these themes?

The Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is one of the best known Chinese American writers in the United States today. In all of her writing, she is intensely interested in the boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and mythology, truth and deception. Whether or not these boundaries are ever very clear, she implies that they are certainly not clear when we are growing up, and that indeed, part of the process or maturing is figuring out what is reality and what is not.

In the selection here, three excerpts taken from her autobiography Woman Warrior, subtitled Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Kingston explores how the stories she heard as a child thoroughly influenced the development of her identity. As with Audre Lorde, Kingston is interested in issues of speaking and silence, in particular how they relate to her growing up as a young Chinese girl in the central valley of California. As an "American Chinese" Kingston felt alienated both from the traditional Chinese world of her mother and the American world of her new home. The selection below comes quite late in her memoir in the late stages of her childhood relationship with her mother.

source: Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Vintage, 1979).

TO DO WHILE READING:

-Mark the places in the text where she talks about "ghosts." Make a notation or two out in the margin on what the meaning of "ghost" is in each particular instance.

REWRITING THE READING:

(1)
Think about how Kingston uses the idea of "ghosts." Freewrite for a page or so about some of the "ghosts" from your childhood. Are there two or three different kinds of "ghosts" you could identify?

(2)
Reread the scene in the drugstore/pharmacy again carefully. Rewrite the scene from the perspective of the druggist.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE READING:

(3)
Kingston gave her autobiography The Woman Warrior the subtitle, Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. How is the concept of "ghosts" central to the process of writing her autobiography and "telling her own story."

How are the "stories" she grew up with related to the "ghosts" she grew up with?

(4)
In the beginning of this selection, Kingston says that if she had grown up in ancient China, she "would have been an outlaw knotmaker." What do you think she means by that? How does that comment anticipate some of the things that she tells later?

(5)
Kingston spends a lot of time talking about her split identity. How does Kingston portray her split identity?

WORKING TOWARD SYNTHESIS:

(6)
This selection by Kingston takes up issues of reality and unreality in many different ways. Throughout her autobiography, Kingston makes it clear that ideas of unreality, make-believe, and the imagination are a vital part of growing up and learning to make sense of the world. Write a paper in which you examine her use of unreality in her autobiography. How does she explore the often "fictional" nature of reality? of social identity? How does she explore the process of telling what's real and what's not as being central to growing up?

(7)
As with so many other contemporary autobiographies, Maxine Hong Kingston's is very concerned with silence and speaking. In a paper, explore how Kingston discusses acts of speaking and keeping silent, telling and keeping secrets. In writing your paper, don't just choose the most obvious descriptive episodes about speaking and silence, but consider some of the ways that Kingston uses ideas about talking and silence in more conceptual ways.

Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity
Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich is best known as a poet, having begun publishing over thirty years ago. One of the major contemporary writers of poetry in the United States, Rich has always been interested in such issues as history, memory, and the politics of sexuality and identity. In the essay printed here, Rich brings these concerns to an important aspect of her own life and upbringing: her Jewish heritage.

As with many of the other writers in this chapter, Rich is struck, looking back to her youth, of the denial and silence with which her Jewishness--and others' anti-semitism--were kept from her. As she says in the essay:

Writing this now I feel belated rage, that I was so impoverished by the family and social worlds I lived in, that I had to try to figure out myself what this did indeed mean for me. That I had never been taught about resistance, only passing. That I had no language for

source: Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (Norton, 1986).

TO DO WHILE READING:

-Pay close attention to the many different aspects of Rich's identity. Be sure and mark the places in the text, especially, where Rich talks about the different aspects of her identity being in conflict or at odds with each other.

REWRITING THE READING:

(1)
Adrienne Rich describes a number of different aspects to her identity. Everyone of us has an identity that is constructed by multiple parts and forces. Freewrite a paragraph in which you explore some of the different aspects that make up your identity.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE READING:

(2)
What does Adrienne Rich mean by the phrase "split at the root"? Think of at least one alternative title for the essay?

(3)
What might Rich mean when she says at the end of the essay, that she'll go on being the "poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor's language sometimes sounds beautiful"? What are the connections between language and oppression in this essay? Find at least one passage where she discusses the ideas of language and oppression together.

WORKING TOWARD SYNTHESIS:

(4)
Although Rich says at the end of the selection, "This essay, then, has no conclusions," she does come to some kind of resolution. Write an short paper in which you take a stand on the meaning of the end of her essay. Do you think that she believes she can integrate and reconcile all of her various identities? Or are they contradictory?

(5)
In this selection, as in many other selections in this chapter, Rich uses the autobiographical mode to explore issues of silence, speaking, and the power or language as important issues in developing identity. Write a paper in which you explore Rich's discussion of silence and speaking. You might also consider other terms she uses that are less obviously related to silence and speaking, words such as taboo, deception and amnesia.

Flying Home
Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, one of the most important novels ever written by an American. Published in 1952, and written throughout the mid and late 1940's, Invisible Man follows an unnamed African American male narrator on a kind of epic journey through America, in search of himself and his own identity. What he finds, however, is the impossibility of possessing any identity except that which he is given by those around him. That, in short, is why the narrator is invisible.

Behind this novel, and all of Ellison's writing, stands a famous quotation by W.E.B. DuBois, an African American sociologist writing around 1900. Of the problem of identity for African Americans, DuBois said:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the rape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twonness,--an American, a Negro; two strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being ron asunder.

As in all of Ellison's writings, "Flying Home" faces the difficulties of assimilation and mobility for African Americans squarely in the face, with an unrelenting refusal to accept easy answers or happy endings.

source: Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories, ed. Clarence Major (Harper, 1993).

TO DO WHILE READING:

-Pay particularly close attention to all of the different layers of reality in the story--that is, mark the different states of consciousness and thinking, such as dreams, nightmares, memories, fantasies, and so on.

-Mark in the text all the different instances of flying and flight.

REWRITING THE READING:

(1)
Obviously 'flying' is the central idea of the story. Make a list of as many different kinds of flight or flying that are implied in the story. What are some of the connotations of 'flying' that you can think of?

(2)
Find two or three places in the story where the word fool is used. Then, write a one paragraph definition of the word fool as it is used in the story.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE READING:

(3)
How would you characterize Todd's feelings toward Jefferson? How do they change through the story?

(4)
How many different forms of storytelling can you find in Ellison's short story? What different kinds of cultural discourse could you classify as storytelling?

(5)
Discuss the role of Jefferson's retelling of the "Flying Fool" tale in the story. In Todd's mind, he compares hearing the "Flying" story to "a sugar-coated pill" intended "to remove the terrible tastes" of something, when he was younger. What might be the point of the story that is so "difficult to swallow"?

What might Todd mean when he tells Jefferson, "Go tell tales to your white folks"?

WORKING TOWARD A THESIS AND SYNTHESIS:

(6)
Write a short paper or journal entry on the cultural affect of stories in Ellison's "Flying Home." How do stories impact on the characters' lives and behavior? How are the characters trapped by their culture's stories?

Yellow Woman
Storytelling
Leslie Marmon Silko

The tradition of "Yellow Woman" stories is widespread among Native American tribes throughout the southwest and southern plains. "Yellow Woman" stories are a "genre" of Native American stories depicting the capture or seduction of the symbolically feminine figure "Yellow Woman" by some force or spirit. The force or spirit who does the capturing varies from story to story.

Sometimes the captor is portrayed as the emobidment of a natural force such as "Sun," or "Whirlwind Man"; sometimes he is a transitional figure between animal and human, such as "Buffalo Man"; and sometimes he is an evil spirit figure of some kind. Many "Yellow Woman" stories begin with her walking along a road, or down by a river filling water jars, when she is abducted.

Even if she is depicted as going willingly, "Yellow Woman" stories often serve to blur the boundaries between seduction and rape, and between conscious knowledge and unconscious desires. As the contemporary writer, Paula Gunn Allen, describes her:

Yellow Woman, like the tradition she lives in, goes on and on. She lives in New Mexico (or that's what they call it at present), around Laguna and other Keresan pueblos as well. She is a Spirit, a Mother, a blessed ear of corn, an archetype, a person, a daughter of a main clan, an agent of change and of obscure events, a wanton, an outcast, a girl who runs of with Navajos, Zunis, or even Mexicans.

Yellow Woman was grinding corn one day with her three sisters. They looked into the water jars and saw that they were empty. They said, "We need some water." Yellow Woman said she would go, and taking the jars made her way across the mesa and went down to the spring. She climbed the rockhewn stairs to the spring that lay in a deep pool of shade. As she knelt to dip the gourd dipper into the cool shadowed water, she heard someone coming down the steps. She looked up and saw Whirlwind Man. He said,
"Guwatzi, Yellow Woman. Are you here?"
"Da'waa'e," she said, dipping water calmly into the four jars beside her. She didn't look at him.
"Put down the dipper," he said. "I want you to come with me."
"I am filling these jars with water as you can see," she said. "My sisters and I are grinding corn, and they are waiting for me."
"No," Whirlwind Man said. "You must come and go with me. If you won't come, well, I'll have to kill you." He showed her his knife.
Yellow Woman put the dipper down carefully. "All right," she said. "I guess I'll go with you." She got up. She went with Whirlwind Man to the other side of the world where he lived with his mother, who greeted her like his wife.

The jars stayed tall and fat and cool in the deep shade by the shadowed spring.

The two stories reprinted here by the contemporary writer, Leslie Marmon Silko, are not traditional Yellow Woman stories, but modern reworkings based on the Yellow Woman tradition. Both the stories-- "Yellow Woman" and "Storytelling" -- are about women who disappear with men. The first story, "Yellow Woman," draws on the Yellow Woman tradition more explicitly, in which the female narrator of the story self-consciously recalls the Yellow Woman stories she heard growing up, and even wonders if she is Yellow Woman herself. The second story, "Storytelling," is more experimental in form, telling the fragments of several stories, all having to do with married women with husbands and families, who either "run off with" or are "stolen by" other men.

Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the most well-known Native American writers in the United States today. Thoroughly acquainted with her own Laguna Pueblo heritage, Silko has written several important works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. In all of her writing, Silko is very interested in blending traditional and modern meanings of Native American stories, while always being attentive to the meaning of "storytelling" itself as a basic cultural act.

source: Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (Arcade, 1981).

TO DO WHILE READING:

-Mark in the margin where you think the story is unclear or confusing.

-Be alert to how both stories treat time: that is, be alert to the way Silko treats time sequences, past and present, and so on.

REWRITING THE READING:

(1)
How many different stories are being told in the story "Storytelling"? Go through the text of the story and mark in- between the "paragraphs" where you think each story starts and stops. Pick one of the stories and expand it to a full page or so, filling in or making up details that are suggested by the fragment in the story.

Get into groups of 2 or 3 and exchange ideas about how many stories are represented in "Storytelling." Then exchange the stories you wrote.

(2)
The ending of "Yellow Woman" is ambiguous. Rewrite the ending of the story to be unambiguously clear in whatever way you want. What would be a possible ending beyond the ending?

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE READING:

(3)
Why is the main character in the "Yellow Woman" story unsure if she is "Yellow Woman"? Why is she so concerned about it? How does her uncertainty about being "Yellow Woman" reflect her general emotions and concerns about being with Silva?

(4)
What are some of the surprising or confusing things about identity in the two stories? Are there conflicting ideas about identity represented in the two stories?

(5)
In an essay called "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective," Silko says this about Pueblo stories:

I think what is essential is this sense of story, and story within story, and the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories, and the sense that stories never truly end. I would like to propose that these views of structure and the dynamics of storytelling are some of the contributions which native American cultures bring to the English language or at least to literature in the the English language.

WORKING TOWARD SYNTHESIS:

(6)
In a short paper or journal entry, discuss how these two stories by Silko explore the idea that people do not live unique lives, but live life-patterns that have already been determined through cultural stories and ideas. You might consider how, in these stories how the characters' behavior is explained or determined through cultural stories? How does Silko use the Yellow Woman tradition to explore these ideas? How does the second story, "Storytelling," reflect back on the "Yellow Woman" story?

Woman Hollering Creek
Sandra Cisneros

In Mexican folklore and folk traditions, there are few prominent women. One of the most prominent and oldest female folk figures is the woman known as La Llorona (pronounced 'La Yorona'). La Llorona means "the wailing woman" and refers to a tradition of stories that involves a spirit-like woman in white who is constantly looking for her dead children, shrieking in psychological pain and sadness. In some versions, including the Spanish version of the story, the woman murders her own children as an act of revenge against an unfaithful husband.

The La Llorona tradition carries a lot of cultural meaning for Mexican and Mexican-American people. The La Llorona tradition, along with other female figures in the Mexican folk tradition, have recently gained new meaning from contemporary Chicana writers as they seek out the stories that have historically defined women in that culture. Drawing directly on the folk tradition of La Llorona as inspiration for the story "Woman Hollering Creek," Sandra Cisneros explores and revises the deeply embedded cultural imagery that has controlled the lives of Mexican and Mexican American women for centuries.

In the La Llorona tradition, the woman is usually associated with a well, a stream or some kind of water. As tradition has it, La Llorona can be seen wailing and looking for her lost children around lakes and rivers. In "Woman Hollering Creek," Cisneros revives the story of La Llorona in order question the cultural premises associated with it. Using a storytelling tradition that portrays women as betrayers (of their husbands and of their children), Cisneros tries to listen to La Llorona's wailing and silence in a contemporary context.

source: Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Vintage, 1991)

TO DO WHILE READING:
-Mark in the margin all the places where she discusses women and their relationship to silence and speaking.

REWRITING THE READING:

(1)
Rewrite the story "Woman Hollering Creek" as if it were an old folktale. Imagine, perhaps, that you are telling a friend or a younger relative, a story you are reminded of, one that begins, "I remember once a woman I knew named Cleofilas . . ." Your rewriting of the story can only be one page, single-space in length.

In small groups then, take turns reading your stories outloud to each other. How do they differ? What are the possibilities for variation? What different readings do each of you have of the story?

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE READING:

(2)
What significance does the telenovelas have to Cleofilas? What does she learn from them? What relation does the knowledge she gets from them have to her life?

(3)
Discuss what the connection might be between her situation as an abused wife and her fascination with the name of the creek, La Gritona? What are some of the thoughts that Cleofilas has about the creek?

(4)
From whose point-of-view is the story written? Is it in the third person? What kind of voice do we hear in the various sections? Is it always the same voice? Do it shift within a section?

WORKING TOWARD SYNTHESIS:

(5)
In "Woman Hollering Creek," Cisneros refers to and incorporates many different kinds of stories. One of the most important of course is the Mexican folktale of La Llorona. Yet in addition to the traditional tale of La Llorona, Cisneros also alludes to other kinds of "stories," such as the "grisly news stories" of men and their wives, or the love stories that she reads and watches on TV.

In a short paper or journal entry, explore how Cisneros uses these various kinds of stories to explore Cleofilas inner thoughts, her situation, and her identity. How does Cisneros' use of stories relate to the issues of gender and marraige raised by the story?

Remember, the topics listed below are just that--topics. You must develop a thesis within the topic that addresses some aspect and draws upon a focussed number of readings and issues within them.

(1) LIFE STORIES: EXPLORING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The first section of this chapter presents a number of different readings about autobiography. Some of the readings are reflections on what it means to write and talk about autobiography, some of the readings are themselves from autobiographies or writing that could be called auto- biographical.

In a full length paper, develop a thesis in which you explore some aspect of autobiography, such as the tension between telling the truth and distortion or, as bell hooks says, the fiction that is part of all retelling. Alternatively you might write a paper in which you discuss different kinds of autobiography or different approaches to being autobiographical, as exemplified by two or three of the writers. For this latter point you might also consider whether the concept of autobiography means different things to different people or categories of people, or even different cultures.

(2) SPEAKING AND SILENCE

All autobgiographies reveal experience, events, or thoughts that first took place in the privacy and intimacy of one's family, one's friendships, one's marriage, even one's mind. For many writers, the act of writing autobiography involves speaking openly about things that were denied, repressed or considered taboo, often at the risk of feeling that they have betrayed the communities that raised them.

In a fully argued paper, explore the ideas of speaking and silence as they are represented in the readings in this chapter. Choose at least two writers and explore how their treatment of speaking and silence are central to telling the story of their lives.

(3) RESPECT AND BELONGING

Whether in the fiction or non-fiction selections, many of the writers in this chapter are concerned with such basic ideas as giving and getting respect, or feeling like an insider or an outsider.

While these are things we all deal with everyday, episodes in our lives in which we learn about such things as respect and belonging can be some of the most memorable. Furthermore, while such things as feeling respected or feeling like you belong are often a matter of emotion or feeling, they are usually related to much larger matters, such as our social position, our position in the hierarchy at our place of work, our position in our families, and so on.

After considering some of the different ways that the writers in this section take up these issues, develop a full paper in which you explore the idea of respect or belonging. You might, for example, compare two different episodes from different writers, and begin your examination of respect or belonging that way. Or, you might explore through one or more writers how matters of respect and disrespect, belonging and rejection, are protrayed as important to developing a sense of self-identity, maturity, and awareness of social realities.

(4) STORIES ABOUT POWER

A lot of stories in this chapter are explicitly about power. That is, they are explicitly stories about power relationships between human beings, stories about people dominating other people and being dominated. Many of these stories, as well, are not only about unequal power relationships and victims of oppression, but about acts of resistance against power and in some cases a reversal of power.

Furthermore, in these stories, issues of power are closely related to issues of language: acts of speaking or not speaking, the ability to perform or tell stories, the ability to master and use the language of one's oppressors back at them.

In a fully argued paper, examine some aspect or aspects of the relationship of power, storytelling, and language. You might think about the way that these interact in the African American folktales and the African American fiction based on them; you might consider how Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich both talk about the language of oppression and what that means in their narratives of growing up; or you might consider Robert Coover and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's stories as explorations of as the social stories through which we employ and experience power in our society. Do not simply talk about the idea of power, but be sure and address how power is expressed through language or in the forms of storytelling itself.

(5) SELF-IDENTITY AND SOCIAL DIFFERENCE

Stuart Hall, as quoted in the introduction to this chapter, has said: "Identity is a narrative of the self; it's the story we tell about the self in order to know who we are." One way to interpret what this means is to say that identity is an accumulated result of many forces that act on us, of countless messages we hear and see as we grow up and live. In order to tell ourselves a story "to know who we are" we need to develop a sense of who we are not. We learn what gender we are by learning about the gender we're not; we learn about our class or ethnicity as much based on people who are different from us as those who are the same.

Throughout these readings, writers are concerned with the development of identity based on social difference, on the discovery of difference and distance from other people, or the discovery of similarities or kinship with those who we assumed were different from us.

In a full paper, choose at least two writers in this chapter and compare their discussions of the development of self-identity in relation to learning about social difference. You could just about use any of the readings, although you might particularly consider the selections by Gary Soto, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Hong Kingston and the interviews about working by Studs Terkel. Among the fiction, you might especially look at the stories by Ralph Ellison and Robert Coover. It would be particularly interesting for this paper to choose two examples that seemed very different from each other.

(6) THE STORIES THAT SHAPE US

Just as in the previous question that focuses on the discovery of identity through difference, this question asks you to write a paper exploring the idea that a person's identity and personality is influenced by the stories that are most central to that person's culture. The readings in this chapter have tried to demonstrate that every culture has its own unique set of stories, with their own history of meaning, and hence their own particular power to shape the behavior and thoughts of that culture's members.

(7) STORIES, FICTION, AND REALITY

Nearly everything about the Western tradition teaches us that there is a clear difference between what is "real" and what is "unreal". We struggle to distinguish a "true story" from a "false story." And in literature, we distinguish between "fiction" and "non-fiction." This chapter has examined the idea of "stories" and "fiction" as if the distinction between things that are fictitious and things that are real were not so easily to define.

Write a fully argued paper in which you develop a thesis addressing the concepts of storytelling, fiction and reality. You should be sure to formulate a thesis that is specific, and draws on two or more of the readings in the chapter.

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