Grace Paley is a "writer's writer," admired by both scholars and
the reading public for her originality and unique voice. In this
first book-length study of her work, Jacqueline Taylor explores the
source of Paley's originality, locating it in the way Paley
transforms language to create strongly woman-centered stories.
Drawing on interviews with the author, as well as the stories
themselves, Taylor emphasizes Paley's awareness that women's voices
have been muted and their stories ignored or left untold in our
culture's male-oriented dominant discourse. She watches Paley in
the process of reshaping language at both the semantic and
narrative levels to make it express women's perceptions and
experiences. In Paley's stories, it becomes possible to ignore
traditional heroic and dramatic themes and instead talk about women
and children in such everyday settings as the playground, the
kitchen, and the grocery store.
Some of the specific techniques Paley uses to accomplish this
include identifying and repudiating sexist language in the dominant
discourse and redefining ordinary words from the perspective of
women. At the narrative level, Taylor reveals how she draws on
women's oral traditions to tell open-ended stories that resist
rigid beginning-middle-and-end structuring.
This transformed language enables Paley to construct a social
world where woman-centered meanings can flourish. In her
nontraditional stories, no single narrator or version of events
dominates. Anyone can be a storyteller and no one has the last
word.
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