Bridging gaps across cultures: The use of glosses in Chicana literature

MARÍA MARTA GARCÍA NEGRONI Y MARÍA LAURA SPOTURNO

Melbourne, Australia

Congreso; XI CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE IPRA (International Pragmatics Association), Melbourne; 2009

International Pragmatics Association (IPRA), Melbourne University y Monash University

As has been largely acknowledged, metadiscourse constitutes one of the most salient marks of the presence of the subject in his/her own discourse, often designating a manner of communication with his/her interlocutor. This paper explores the function of certain metadiscursive elements in Chicana literature, which are, as will be argued, used to bridge gaps across cultures. More specifically, we will focus on the special use of glosses in Chicana literature, particularly in Sandra Cisneros’s fiction, in which this metadiscursive device takes on a fundamental role in the construction of an intercultural discourse. According to Authier-Revuz (1984, 1995), glosses can be defined as forms of discourse, which, signalling a point of alterity, account for the presence of a constitutive Other. The use of glosses generally marks an intention on the part of the discursive subject to exert dominion over the sense of discourse by specifying the parameters and points of view to be observed by the interlocutor/reader when processing discourse. By making explicit how a certain sequence must be interpreted, glosses introduce a kind of enunciative suspense regarding that sequence. The resort to glosses in Chicano literary discourse –as much as in other minority and diaspora literatures, and postcolonial writing—, poses a challenge for the discourse analyst, as these discourses are constituted in the interaction of linguistic and cultural elements, which are simultaneously associated to more than one cultural community. Thus, most metadiscursive forms in Cisneros’s narrative are used to comment and reflect about different aspects of the above-mentioned encounter. According to our hypothesis, in Cisneros’s fiction, glosses operate as a strategy of intercultural communication, whose presence eventually becomes a distinctive trait of the author’s style. Cisneros’s writing, built mainly upon the encounter of two languages, evidences a double function of this metadiscursive device. On the one hand, the writer’s particular use of glosses –generally designed to explain cultural-linguistic meanings, which are alien to the Anglo readers– shows her well-known concern about “opening doors for people who don’t know the culture” (Dasenbrock, 1991). On the other hand, in her narrative, glosses indicate the incapacity of English to express certain meanings, which become constitutive of the voice enunciating discourse. Following this double function, we have classified the corpus of our research in two groups. In the first set of examples, the intention to bridge the gap across cultures through the use of different kinds of glosses is made manifest: “The Awful Grandmother calls Father mijo. Mijo. My son. –Mijo, mijo. (…) She uses the Spanish word hijos, which means sons and children all at once” (Cisneros, 2002, 29). In the second group, the tension between languages and cultures becomes most evident as the following example shows: “But that’s –how do you say it?— water under the damn? I can’t ever get the sayings right even though I was born in this country. We didn’t say shit like that in our house” (Cisneros, 1991, 73). The analysis of different types of glosses will allow us to explain one of the most important devices used by Cisneros in building an intercultural discourse meant to bridge the gaps across communities.   NB: El resumen presentado para la exposición efectuada contó con una evaluación por parte del Comité de Lectura del Congreso. En nuestra presentación, empleamos el apoyo visual de la presentación de powerpoint que adjunto.