Investigating the Missing "I" in Zubaidah... My Story : A Dialogic Consideration

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper starts with the question: What drives/motivates someone to write about his or her own life? This question is ubiquitous and has been one of the major concerns in the study of autobiographical writings. It has been argued that such writings, though personal, are seen as a way of liberating women from the shackle of male oppression. Autobiography allows women to have a voice, and to have it heard too. In effect, women find agency in their writing, allowing them to be and feel like subjects. The development of critical theory such as postmodernism further complicates the relationship between writing and female subjectivity as it foregrounds the irrevocable fragmentation of the subject. Employing Lynne Pearce’s feminist reading of Bakthin’s dialogics as theoretical framework, this paper suggests an alternative reading to Zubaidah... My Story, arguing that what critics of autobiography can do is to re-engage with and then re-evaluate the poetics of perception, foregrounding the urgency of reconstructing female reality. Hinging on my role as a reader, I argue that one way to re-engage and re-evaluate the constituents of the writer’s subjectivity is to dialogically approach the text as it is within this reconstruction that her story is elevated from mere historical account to culturally relevant communication of the female self.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Dialogism, the Subject and the Reader
• The I of the Beholder
• The Eye of the Beholder
• Conclusion
• References