A Unique Writing Of Black Female Experience-a Narratological Approach To Bell Hooks’s Bone Black: Memories Of Girlhood

Acknowledged as feminist, cultural critic, author and educator, bell hooks isprolific in works on the analysis of interactions among race, gender, class and culture.Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (hereafter Bone Black), as her first autobiography,represents her experiences of growth as a black female born in a Southern working classfamily. The autobiography whose content is integrated with most of her feministthoughts criticizes the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” she experienced.Compared with other autobiographies written by black or white writers, some formalfeatures seem significant in her autobiographical writing, such as her non-linear andfragmented dual narrative structure, the third-person narration and trans-generic feature.Criticisms are either concentrated on ideological aspects as feminist and ethnicityor on formalistic aspects as genre and style. Few have ever penetrated the autobiographywith the combination of formalistic and ideological levels. The thesis tries to interpretthe unique formalistic features of Bone Black in terms of narratology and delves into therelationship between narrative tactics and her presentation of black female experiences.The objective is to fill in the blank of this autobiography’s research, combiningformalistic study with ideological study.The thesis consists of five chapters. Introduction, the first chapter, focuses on bellhooks, her first autobiography Bone Black and literature review.The second chapter starts with Bone Black’s three modes of narrative structuresuch as non-linear structure, fragmented structure and dual narrative structure, analyzingtheir contributions to hooks’s unique presentation of her black female experiences andhighlighting the metaphorical effect of her narrative structure as a crazy quilt.Chapter Three explores the trans-generic feature of Bone Black in the level ofnarrating, which mainly embodies in the fictiveness of the third-person narration. In thethird-person narrative of Bone Black, the dissociation of the author and the narrator implies the author’s strive for fictional narrative and produces the narrative effect ofventriloquism.Chapter Four explores the uniqueness of the above narrative features in terms ofideology. The narrative features and the generic hybridity belong to postmodernnarrative, making Bone Black a well woven postmodern text. Quilting andventriloquism represent two modes of black female experience in postmodernautobiographical writing.Chapter Five is the conclusion. It attempts to define the relation of narrative andideology in Bone Black, the epistemological foundation of the thesis. By acclaiming thesignificance of narrative tactics, it confirms the methodological value of thenarratological approach on the interpretation of Bone Black.