Writing silence: Awakening the unspoken (with Original writing, Short stories, Poetry, Novella, Alice Walker, Tennessee Williams, Sandra Cisneros, Zora Neale Hurston)

“Writing Silence: Awakening the Unspoken,” an exploration of female silence as expressed in contemporary southern fiction, is divided into two sections: Creative Writing and Contextual Essay. The creative portion, composed of short stories, poetry, and a novella, utilizes fictional strategies, designed to express female silence in literary form. The “Contextual Essay” is a feminist exploration of the rhetorical strategies and images, which literary writers have utilized to convey the unspoken. Southern literature embodies universal human struggles, questions, tensions, triumphs, and silences. Silence, an unspoken language, communicates on a very fundamental level of understanding. Silence, which simultaneously embraces empowerment and oppression, writes itself upon the body and can be translated into text. Certain images and strategies induce silence, and by altering the image and/or strategy, the writer can change the quality of the silence.; The Contextual Essay identifies significant images and narrative strategies that writers, particularly female writers, use either consciously or intuitively to express female silence. Although the gender of the writer plays a remarkable role in how this silence is presented to the reader, male writers use similar techniques to express the silence of their female characters. The study translates silence into identifiable elements in literary fiction. Since women intuitively internalize these images, it is important to identify these universal images/strategies so as to rewrite the female experience. The creative portion illustrates the universal images/strategies identified in the contextual essay. Writers explored in the Contextual Essay include: Alice Walker, Tennessee Williams, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God illustrates the woman cycle of self-emergence as documented in Women's Ways of Knowing. The Contextual Essay concludes by listing the common characteristics of literary silence. Common characteristics of literary silence include the following: divisions, marginalization, nonhuman status, isolation, metaphors, style of speech, female content, body language, white space, typographical markers, tactical diversions, and textual noise.