Resisting Incidents

Summary

Particular communicative contexts seem inevitably to trigger resistance. When a writer or narrator is different in race, gender, or class from the implied or actual reader, questions about authority and authenticity multiply. As Susan Lanser points out in The Narrative Act, a writer's or a narrator's social identity is never totally irrelevant, but readers automatically assume that the “unmarked” narrator is a literate white male. When the title page, the book jacket, or any other source marks one as not white, not a man, or not to the manor born, different sets of cultural assumptions “determined by the ideological system and the norms of social dominance in a given society” (Lanser, 166) come into play. When the topic or the general development of the text coincides thematically with the readers' assumptions about the writer's or narrator's social identity, status becomes particularly significant to the discursive context. “Social identity and textual behavior,” Lanser concludes, “combine to provide the reader with a basis for determining the narrator's mimetic authority” (Lanser, 169).

Lanser uses gender as her primary focus, but her thesis applies as well to other writers whose race or class places them outside the courts of power and privilege. Any attempt by an individual who is not white, male, and at least middle class to be acknowledged as part of the literary or intellectual community is inevitably challenged, even by readers who share their racial, social, or gender status.