Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jesse Alemán

Critical Essay by Jesse Alemán

SOURCE: Alemán, Jesse. “Chicano Novelistic Discourse: Dialogizing the Corrido Critical Paradigm.” MELUS 23, no. 1 (spring 1998): 49–64.

In the following essay, Alemán discusses the corrido tradition in Chicano novels and how Hunger of Memory fits into this tradition.

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's.

(Bakhtin 293)

The dialogic nature of language Mikhail Bakhtin describes in “Discourse in the Novel” is nothing new to Chicano literary production, especially considering the “interlingualism” that distinguishes it from North American literature in English and Mexican literature in Spanish.¹ Numerous critics have already pointed out how Chicano literature straddles the borderlines of two national languages as it incorporates and combines each to create a hybrid discourse that registers the liminal cultural position Chicanos occupy between both linguistic world views....
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