Rites of coherence: Autobiographical writings by Hurston, Brooks, Angelou and Lorde.

This study is an examination of the constraints and contradictions of textual self-construction in four autobiographical narratives written by contemporary African American women writers. Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Track on a Road (1942) is analyzed as the tensional exploration of the self in folklore which eludes the demands of self- discovery and begrudgingly comes to terms with the politics of publishing. Gwendolyn Brooks's Report from Part One (1972) is a modern text, which articulates the personal and the testimonial at the crucial moment for the poet of the discovery of the Black Arts Movement. It flaunts its fragmentation, its ancillary status vis a vis her poetic and novelistic works. Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969) is the dramatized narrative of racial and sexual forces as they shape the individual black female self (body and mind) in the South of segregation. Reading the black and female body in the text means exploring an identity built on fracture, on the razor edge between silence and song, death and survival. Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) summons a reconciliation with the mother(s) through a poetic retelling of her life, which is then offered to the rest of the lesbian community. With her biomythography, individual history is transmuted into myth. Ultimately, the surface coherence of autobiographical writing is questioned by the exposure of the racial and sexual dynamics at work in the production of Dust Tracks on a Road through a comparison between the published text and the different manuscript versions. Hurston's autobiography is presented as the outcome of an unequal dialogue between writer and editors. Discontinuities are privileged, as the analysis moves from an emphasis on the politics of the private and the public (Hurston and Brooks) to the poetics of the body in pain and pleasure (Angelou and Lorde).Ph.D.American literatureBlack studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128831/2/9208630.pd