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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This is an 8 page paper that provides an overview of Walker's "The Color Purple". Through a postmodern reading of the work, Walker's treatment of gender identity is explored. Bibliography lists 7 sources.
Page Count:
8 pages (~225 words per page)
File: KW60_KFlit015.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
The novel tells the story of Celie and Nettie, two sisters who undergo abuse from a long string of male authority figures throughout their lives, but nevertheless, through their interactions
with other women in different social and cultural contexts, find a way to assert their individuality, escape the cycle of abuse, and develop a meaningful life for themselves, defined on
their own terms. The manner in which the novel handles themes of gender and identity are particularly astute and relevant for contemporary discussions of gender because of the postmodernist stance
which the novel adopts towards the issue of gender: by viewing gender as a social construct, Walker enables the characters to present the means of deconstructing those social constructs of
expected and traditional gender roles, as well as the patriarchal power structures that serve to reinforce them. This paragraph helps the student begin to introduce postmodernist theory and explain
how it relates to Walkers novel. To understand how "The Color Purple" presents a postmodern view of feminism and gender identity, one must first understand the basic assumptions of postmodern
theory. To begin with, one must understand that postmodernism, as the name suggests, is something of a reactionary aesthetic and philosophical movement, having been founded in direct opposition to the
tenets of modernism (namely, the scientific objectivity and conception of "social progress" defined during the Enlightenment era). The theory holds that individual views of reality are all necessarily distorted by
social, historical, and cultural biases, and as such, that the majority of ideas which are often held as objective are actually socially constructed and thus malleable and flexible. For feminists,
this also applies to the concept of gender. Historical and social traditional in the West attempts to define femininity in a specific manner, often relegating women to a secondary role
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