Elizabeth Bishop’s sounds of sanity

In this article, I examine the implications of rewriting definitions of sanity and insanity through the use of noise, silence, and language,positioningElizabeth Bishop’s short story “In the Village” as a form of resistance against traditional readings of madness, logocentrism, and identity. I suggest that by writing her characters as undivided from the world of sound, Elizabeth Bishop’s story shifts understandings of insanity, which is often conceptualized through denials of agency, allowing her characters to escape in noises and hesitations in language and communication. “In the Village” avoids silencing the “insane” mother through her placement in a caesura of sound and silence. This article avoids a biographical reading of “In the Village,” which is often connected with her own mother’s “mental breakdown,” because Bishop’s writing would have been as much affected by her conscious awareness of her past as it was by the unconscious impulses and histories of writing in the West. Rather, I take into account Bishop’s own personal history as well as the repetitions that reflect a placement in a tradition appearing in the story itself. Using this particular lens, I believe a rereading of “In the Village” is in order, where the “mad mother” is not silenced by the oppressive social structures that control the insane,” but she instead finds escape in the multitudes of sounds that associate with her, erasing the power of language and opening a new world where agency exists in a scream or in a striking hammer.

Minha filha aprende a falar: percurso de aquisição da linguagem de uma criança brasileira nos tempos actuais

RESUMO: A linguagem é o traço distintivo do ser humano. É por meio dela que nos comunicamos, formamos todos os nossos conceitos, temos uma estória e cultura. A capacidade humana para adquirir um sistema de regras tão complexo como é a linguagem verbal, em um espaço de tempo relativamente curto, tem despertado o interesse de estudiosos ao longo do tempo. Conforme a literatura consultada, a linguagem, de caráter inato, é adquirida em um meio de falantes, seguindo etapas universais de desenvolvimento. Interrogamo-nos então se, nos tempos atuais, marcados pela globalização, esse processo mantem-se igual ou pode sofrer modificações. Esta dissertação resulta de um estudo feito durante os anos 2007/2009, com uma criança brasileira, e teve como objetivo principal descrever o percurso de aquisição da linguagem nos tempos atuais, utilizando a metodologia do estudo de caso. Os dados coletados foram analisados sob os cinco componentes da linguagem: Fonologia, Morfologia, Sintaxe, Semântica e Pragmática, e comparados ao referencial teórico, no intuito de identificar semelhanças e/ou diferenças entre ambos. ABSTRACT: The language is the human‟s differential trace. It is whereby that we communicate, we form all our concepts, we have a story and culture. The human capacity to acquire a rules system such complex as the verbal language, in a relatively short time space, has been awaking the interest of studious along time. According to the consulted literature, the languae, of innate character, is acquired in a way of speakers, following universal stages of development. So, we asked us if, in the current times, marked by globalization, this process keep equal or can suffer modifications. This dissertation results from a study reayized during years 2007/2008, with a Brazilian child, and it had as main goal to describe the language acquisition route in the current times, using the case study as methodology. The collected data were analyzed under the five language components: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantic and Pragmatic, and compared to theory, intending identifying similarities and/or differences between both.