Latino Literature - Literary Criticism, Society & Culture in Literature, Mexican Americans & Chicanos

Tolerating Ambiguity

Name: Tolerating Ambiguity
Author: Wilson Neate
ISBN: 9780820430942

by Neate, Wilson, March, Kathleen N.

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Overview

Although recent criticism, focused on issues of resistance and border writing, holds that Chicano/a representations of self and community unsettle and transform hegemonic ideology, it has not fully explained that deconstructive potential. Tolerating Ambiguity argues that the symbolic force of Chicano/a writing is an attribute of ethnic writing which, as a symptom or reminder of the repressed ethnicity of the national consciousness, disturbs the latter. Drawing on different genres, this study analyzes how Chicano/a writing, symptomatic of a repressed prenational identity, resists the binary symbolic order of the national consciousness to yield representations of communities characterized by a resistance to closure and homogeneity and by an accommodation of differences.

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Editorials

Karen Christian

"Wilson Neate's trailblazing study charts a new course for Chicano/a literary criticism. Tolerating Ambiguity: Ethnicity and Community in Chicano/a Writing offers an innovative approach to Chicano/a texts that foregrounds the complex relationship of this literature to U.S. national identity. Neate's carefully constructed theoretical framework, a convincing fusion of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and cultural criticism, provides fresh, insightful readings of a variety of Chicano/a works. Boldly highlighting the diversity of Chicano/a writing, Tolerating Ambiguity is essential reading for serious scholars of Chicano/a literature." --Karen Christian, University of Maryland

Booknews

Deepens recent critical approaches by presenting a theoretical analysis of the deconstructive turn in Chicano/a writing, evidenced in its textual engagements with different constituencies. Puts into a larger context the observations that writers displace hegemonic ideology with plural and mutable possibilities that reflect their resistance and border sensibility. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.