Article published In:
Keeping Ourselves Alive[Journal of Narrative and Life History 3:2/3] 1993
► pp. 255–268
[Journal of Narrative and Life History 3:2/3] 1993
► pp. 255–268
Tillie Olsen: Probing the Boundaries Between Text and Context
Abstract
Cultural criticism necessitates not only an examination of the context of the writer but also a broader understanding of the ways in which text and context are integrally interrelated. For pursuing these intersections, Tillie Olsen's short fiction in Tell Me a Riddle is particularly exemplary because of its textual richness and its distinctive ways of drawing on historical context. Interviews with Olsen heighten the significance of her particular context in the 1950s and emphasize the shaping effect that circumstances had on her choices in language and form as she wrote this fiction. Two concerns surface as particularly impor-tant: family life and political activism. An inquiry into these two concerns then suggests the complexity of how voice and circumstance, language and social forces, interact—in the writer, in the text, in the reader, and finally in the choices we might make for shaping alternative understandings of cultural change. (Cultural criticism; literary criticism)
References (20)
Bakhtin, M. (1984). The dialogical imagination: Four essays M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. 
Coiner, C. (1992). "No one's private ground": A Bakhtinian reading of Tillie Olsen's Tell me a riddle. Feminist Studies, 181, 257–281. 
Duncan, E. (1982). Coming of age in the thirties: A portrait of Tillie Olsen. Book Forum, 61, 207–222.
Faulkner, M. (1993). Protest and possibility in the writing of Tillie Olsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Fox-Genovese, E. (1989). Literary criticism and the politics of the new historicism. In H. A. Veeser (Ed.), The new historicism (pp. 213–224). New York: Routledge.
Frye, J. S. (1981). "I stand here ironing": Motherhood as experience and metaphor. Studies in Short Fiction, 181, 287–292.
Gallagher, C. (1989). Marxism and the new historicism. In H. A. Veeser (Ed.), The new historicism (pp. 37–48). New York: Routledge.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic.
Greenblatt, S. (1988). Shakespearean negotiations: The circulation of social energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press.
LaCapra, D. (1989). Soundings in critical theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Marcus, J. (1989). The asylums of Antaeus: Women, war, and madness-Is there a feminist fetishism? In H. A. Veeser (Ed.), The new historicism (pp. 132–157). New York: Routledge.
Montrose, L. A. (1989). Professing the Renaissance: The poetics and politics of culture. In H. A. Veeser (Ed.), The new historicism (pp. 15–36). New York: Routledge.
Newton, J. L. (1989). History as usual? Feminism and the "new historicis". In H. A. Veeser (Ed.), The new historicism (pp. 152–167). New York: Routledge.
Olsen, T. (1979). Silences. New York: Delta. (Original work published 1978)
(1989). Tell me a riddle. New York: Delta. (Original work published 1961)
Orr, E. (1987). Tillie Olsen and a feminist spiritual vision. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Pearlman, M., & Werlock, A. H. P. (1991). Tillie Olsen. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Rosenfelt, D. (1981). From the thirties: Tillie Olsen and the radical tradition. Feminist Studies, 71, 370–406.
Ruddick, S. (1980). Maternal thinking. Feminist Studies, 61, 343–367.
Veeser, H. A. (1989). Introduction. In H. A. Veeser (Ed.), The new historicism (pp. ix–xvi). New York: Routledge.