SOURCE: Auger, Philip. “A Lesson about Manhood: Appropriating ‘The Word’ in Ernest Gaines's A Lesson before Dying.” Southern Literary Journal 27, no. 2 (spring 1995): 74-85.

In the following essay, Auger examines how Jefferson of A Lesson before Dying both appropriates and subverts the dominant discourse of the white American South in order to assume the position of a male subject.

The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes “one's own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to the moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language … but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one's own. (Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse...