You Got to Tell: Private Spaces and Public Narrators in Grace Paley’s Stories

The American storyteller Grace Paley (December 11, 1922-August 22, 2007) has been known for her political activism and her ability to construct powerful voices which recollected female, migrant, and urban collective experiences in post-World War II America. In her stories, Paley emphasizes the act...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Diana Ortega Martín
Format: Article
Language:Spanish
Published: Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2023-01-01
Series:Literatura: Teoría, Historia, Crítica
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Online Access:https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/lthc/article/view/100650
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Summary:The American storyteller Grace Paley (December 11, 1922-August 22, 2007) has been known for her political activism and her ability to construct powerful voices which recollected female, migrant, and urban collective experiences in post-World War II America. In her stories, Paley emphasizes the act of storytelling as a tool for creating a collective shared experience out of individual characters, making the personal and domestic collective and political. In this paper, I will analyze the role of Paley’s most prominent narrator, Faith Darwin, bridging the gap between the private and public urban spheres in three different and evolutive stories: “A Conversation with My Father” (1972), “The Long-Distance Runner” and “Faith in a Tree” (1974). These stories exemplify how Faith uses different strategies in storytelling with the purpose of achieving personal identity and empowerment through communal identification and the recollection of familiar experiences
ISSN:0123-5931
2256-5450