Dialogic discourse in terms of nature, race, and gender in fictions by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Gloria Naylor

This study examines the dynamics of the self-other relationship in Bakhtinian dialogism as well as in American Southern Literature to hear the concealed/oppressed voices of others in terms of nature, race, and gender. The Bakhtinian self and human existence are dialogic and a way of seeing the world is dialogic as well, inviting otherness and thus the self-other relationship. American Southern literature also appreciates otherness because of the cultural, social, historical, ideological background of the community.; I explore how the Bakhtinian self-other relationship interpenetrates the major concepts of dialogism such as the speaking subject, intertextuality/intersubjectivity, heteroglossia, double-voiced discourse, polyphony, internally persuasive discourse, and carnival including ambivalent carnival laughter and the carnival grotesque. I also examine what makes American Southern literature Southern.; William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Gloria Naylor address the self-other relationship and thus the voices of others. I analyze Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, with Bakhtinian double-voiced discourse and carnival to reveal Faulkner's self-contradiction between his efforts to hear the voices of others and his desire for authoritative discourse as well as the relations between nature and race. I examine how Welty in The Golden Apples tries to reappropriate male canonical texts to search for her own voice as well as the voices of others in terms of nature and gender. Welty rewrites and redefines canonical texts in intertextual relations to subvert the patriarchal ideology through unconventional women artists in this polyphonic text with interior dialogues. Naylor also rewrites male canonical texts while she inherits the African American tradition. I examine how Naylor in Mama Day deals with matriarchy embracing both the rational and nonrational world, which interacts with the problematic ideology of patriarchy and rationalism, in Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Naylor pursues a harmonious self-other relationship between nature and humans as well as among humans in Mama Day.; This dissertation opens up a new dimension to the way dialogic interactions between the self and the other, dealing with the issues of nature, race, and gender, may integrate a number of cultural, ethical, epistemological, and artistic concerns.