Book contents
- The Stylistics of ‘You’
- The Stylistics of ‘You’
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Table
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Theorising the ‘You Effects’
- PART I Singularising and Sharing
- PART II The Role of ‘You’ in the Writing of Traumatic Events
- Part III The Author–Reader Channel across Time, Gender, Sex and Race
- 6 Two Ways of Conversing with the Reader
- 7 Empathy for Sexual Minorities in Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett ()
- 8 The Ethics and Politics of the Second Person in ‘Postcolonial’ Writing
- PART IV New Ways of Implicating Through the Digital Medium?
- References
- Index
8 - The Ethics and Politics of the Second Person in ‘Postcolonial’ Writing
from Part III - The Author–Reader Channel across Time, Gender, Sex and Race
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2022
- The Stylistics of ‘You’
- The Stylistics of ‘You’
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Table
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Theorising the ‘You Effects’
- PART I Singularising and Sharing
- PART II The Role of ‘You’ in the Writing of Traumatic Events
- Part III The Author–Reader Channel across Time, Gender, Sex and Race
- 6 Two Ways of Conversing with the Reader
- 7 Empathy for Sexual Minorities in Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett ()
- 8 The Ethics and Politics of the Second Person in ‘Postcolonial’ Writing
- PART IV New Ways of Implicating Through the Digital Medium?
- References
- Index
Summary
Chapter 8 foregrounds the ethics and politics of the second person in ‘postcolonial’ writing, addressing the use of ‘you’ in yet two other genres, that of the essay in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988) and that of the short story with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ published in an eponymous collection in 2009. Kincaid and Adichie use two different techniques to have the reader reflect on her own beliefs and prejudices through a rhetoric of contrast. Kincaid targets specific readers (‘you the tourist’) as representative of the white western tourists who fly every day to her native island Antigua to get away from their daily burden. She thus reduces the reference of ‘you’ to a specific membership category she stigmatises in her very powerful interpellation of the self-centred tourists, denouncing the tourist industry her native island Antigua is subjected to. Whilst Kincaid uses direct forceful address, Adichie chooses a You type that brings the reader to align with the character’s perspective in a more indirect yet as forceful way that the pragma-linguistic analysis of the short story will precisely display.
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- The Stylistics of ‘You'Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects, pp. 174 - 194Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022