• Le Fils Du Pauvre De Mouloud Feraoun

Three of Patricia MacLachlan's novels have female protagonists between the ages of ten and twelve: Cassie Binegar, Unclaimed Treasures, and The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt. Each of these novels is a narrative about a girl who feels silenced by external forces and who subsequently regains a more developed interior voice than the one she has lost. As a result, in these stories the traditional narrative of female silencing is itself silenced by revisionary narratives of female articulation. Many feminists have pointed to female voicelessness as a recurring obstacle for women in our culture. Psychological theorists posit cultural silencing as one of the dominant forces that shape female adolescence, and literary theorists have shown how this social phenomenon of silencing manifests itself in literature. Recently, feminists have formulated strategies that promote narrative as a way for women to connect so that they might overcome this socio-literary silencing. Those of MacLachlan's novels that focus on the development of preadolescent girls are remarkable in the ways that they combine these literary and psychological theories.

Les Chemins qui Montent by Mouloud Feraoun. Translation Narratives: Reading Mouloud Feraoun. Writing to his French editor of his subsequent novel Les Chemins qui.

After each of MacLachlan's girl protagonists interacts with the narratives of other female characters, she resolves a conflict with her mother and gains understandings of both her own sexuality and of some artistic process. Her increased awareness leads to her ability to formulate a 'new fiction' that breaks from traditional cultural silencing. And their victories serve as a literary tour de force for feminism. Central to these victories is the value each of these texts places on language. Until MacLachlan's preadolescent girls learn the power that language gives them, they are frustrated into silence because they try to understand abstract concepts in concrete, physical terms. MacLachlan's texts illustrate this frustration by relying on the rhetorical End Page 202 device of aporia: each character temporarily loses her ability to speak because she is placed in a dilemma.

As long as she looks to the external voices of authority to solve a dichotomy that disturbs her, she is silenced by aporia; but once she learns to rely on her interior voice, she is better able to express herself. According to classical rhetoric, aporia results from the impossibility of concluding an antilogical argument wherein two contradictory statements seem either simultaneously true or simultaneously false. Because no conclusion can be drawn, the rhetorician is silenced. For example, one might feel perplexed-as does the protagonist of MacLachlan's Unclaimed Treasures-by the antilogical paradox that flying is both extraordinary and ordinary: for a human, flying is extraordinary; for a bird, it is ordinary (76-77). Given the original terms of the argument, however, no absolute conclusion can be reached as to whether the act of flying is itself purely ordinary or purely extraordinary. Plato resolves the paralyzing effect of this type of antilogical rhetoric with the implementation of a third term to create the conclusion of a dialectical argument: the synthesis. Unlike antilogic, the dialectic allows for the restating of the original question so that it can be answered.

In this way, with the synthesis that intuitive thinking allows, the aporia that stems from binary thinking can be avoided. The concept of aporia is pertinent to MacLachlan's works in its metaphorical ability to demonstrate the centrality of language to a girl's subject position. While experiencing the voicelessness of aporia, the individual cannot shape her own experience, nor can she interact with other people. She is only an object in other people's dialogues. But as each of MacLachlan's characters recovers from her aporia, she develops a subject position that gives her new power. No longer silenced, no longer the object of someone else's experiences, she can finally engage with other people by expressing herself.

Le Fils Du Pauvre De Mouloud Feraoun

Her increased immersion in language processes, then, is instrumental to her growth. Significantly, MacLachlan's texts also create temporary aporic experiences for the reader. Cassie Binegar, Unclaimed Treasures, and The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt set up an antilogical argument for the reader to work through at the.

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