Each author’s language “is sent, failing, on a wandering journey of endless mediation,” unable to cement and bring home a fixed meaning, leaving their works at the meeting point of music and language.
This essay will focus on the mechanisms of establishing these identities and their relation to each other, specifically through the lens of language use and policy.
How can you reconcile your identity as a liberating force while using the language of your oppressor and benefiting from physical freedom that many of those in your homeland do not possess? Assia Djebar wrestles with these questions in "Fantasia."
“Look, Doni!” the girl called to me, “I’m like a bird!” She discovering “the other,” organizing the world around her into the grammar of you/I, bird/not-bird, like/not-like.
Communication through language is an inescapable performance, Nietzsche tells us, and we’re all actors in it. The precarious question of how truth gets performed is loudly answered by the central characters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s novel "To The Lighthouse."