On Thursday, the GEA will be hosting our second works-in-progress workshop. Lindsay Bartkowski will be presenting a conference length paper entitled “Silence and Violence in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnodio: From the Thirties.” If you plan to attend this meeting, please email a request for the paper to templeGEA@gmail.com.

Lindsay has provided the following abstract of her paper:

“Silence and Violence in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties”

Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties offers an impressionistic representation of poverty in a town “like Omaha” from the perspective of Mazie Holbrook, a fragile, wide-eyed adolescent. Mazie’s story oscillates between moments of isolation, characterized by profound introspection about that which she is “a-knowen” and that which she cannot understand, and interactions with the adult world that are almost exclusively described in terms of the grotesque. Bodies, both her own and those in the world around her, become sites of violence and pain. Bodies are frustrated, suffering containers that hold the unknowable and inexpressible. Olsen writes that “Sorrow is tongueless. Apprehension tore it out long ago” (30). This paper will reflect on the inability of language to express and explain suffering in Yonnondio and explore Olsen’s tentative and slippery representations of the ineffable. My paper will further consider the absence of adequate modes of self-expression, such as art and literature, in the world of the Holbrooks and how this absence forecloses the possibility of communion between the family members and induces instead painful isolation. My paper will examine chiefly the mind-body dichotomy through which Mazie sees the world, as well as the particularly oppressive nature of the feminine body as represented in Mazie’s mother, the ever-pregnant, unhappy, and crazed Anna Holbrook. It is my contention that the style of Olsen’s novel explodes narrative form in order to show the limiting and limited nature of closed systems of meaning as such. Her political concerns, as well as her feminist ethics, shape Olsen’s Yonnondio and create a haunting, untouchable anti-narrative that only begins to tell the story of a family like the Holbrooks in a coal mining town like Omaha.

The purpose of these sessions is to provide Temple English graduate students an informal opportunity to present their works in progress, using feedback from fellow students and faculty to develop their essays and continuing research. The GEA anticipates having several WIP events throughout the semester. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please contact Megan Holmberg.