Featherless Chickens, Laughing Women, and Serious Stories

by Jeannie B Thomas

Overview

Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two grandmothers. While analyzing the tapes of these sessions, she notices the inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of painful stories. In this book, Thomas combines these personal narratives with original scholarship drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to uncover meaning behind the startling presence of unconventional laughter in women's histories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813917238
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	07/29/1997
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jeannie B. Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana State University.

Editorial Reviews

In this unusual amalgam of memoir and scholarly analysis, Thomas (English, Indiana State Univ.) has reworked in narrative the recorded oral histories of her mother and two grandmothers. These stories tell of traumatic events such as natural disasters, child abuse, abandonment, suicide attempts, and sexual harassment. Interspersed among the narrative segments is a discussion of unconventional laughter and its presence in the mother's and grandmothers' stories. Thomas connects Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnival laughter and Julia Kristeva's ideas of abjection to the episodes of inappropriate laughter in the recordings, demonstrating how the laughter can provide insight into the narratives. The result is a significant contribution to both women's studies and humor theory. Readers will find the narratives lively, engaging, and moving and will pay more attention to the laughter they will hear.Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo, North Rose

Library Journal