Abstract
This paper aims to provide a reflection on literary representations of home alternatively to current collocations in the media, in the psychological and sociological realm (home vs comfort zone). The selection of two postcolonial texts, one by Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970), and another by Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984), provides ways-in to discuss changing social and cultural experiences with a focus on characters’ search for identity in a multicultural and multilingual setting, as is the one in the United States. The study will depart from a brief theoretical survey (Anderson 1991) to a corpus-based approach which maps such shifts and changes (Baker 2006) while resorting to a close analysis of contexts of occurrence of the keywords home and house, along with their patterns of collocation, in the texts under scope (from the sentence to the textual levels, following Biber et al. 1998; Sinclair 2004, among other). The analysis is meant to unveil ways in which writers make use of linguistic structures and most importantly what it means to be at home when characters never felt welcome there, or characters’ inner / outer struggle to develop a sense of belonging in disrupted settings.
Highlights
Introduction and AimsIIn her article on “The Application of Hahn’s (2007) Ten Commandments of Intercultural Communication in Business Interaction”, Kačmárová definitely advocates that one should “be aware of personal space, as people from different cultures have different comfort zones” (2009, 59)
This paper aims to provide a reflection on literary representations of home alternatively to current collocations in the media, in the psychological and sociological realm
Might be the case of the literary depictions offered both in the novel The Bluest Eye (1970), by Toni Morrison, and in the collection of stories The House on Mango Street (1984), by Sandra Cisneros, in the postmodern period, referred in this article as BE and HMS
Summary
Living in between a house and a home: Where’s the comfort zone anyway? Dislocated identities in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. La elección de dos textos poscoloniales, uno de Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970), y otro de Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984), proporciona el punto de partida para el análisis de experiencias sociales y culturales cambiantes, centrando la atención en la búsqueda de identidad de los personajes en un marco multicultural y multilingüe como es Estados Unidos. The selection of two postcolonial texts, one by Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970), and another by Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984), provides ways-in to discuss changing social and cultural experiences with a focus on characters’ search for identity in a multicultural and multilingual setting, as is the one in the United States. In literature such an imitation always serves the assimilative function, whose aim is so to symbolize the absent, the unavailable, the ungraspable that they may become accessible. (Iser [1978] 1994, 254)
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