hmm, thank you for the recommendation. (i had never heard of gayl jones, and now i am looking her up.)
there's something about "regular prose fiction" that makes writing in any kind of "dialect" complicated, i think. comics are neat (plays too, come to think of it) because they're _all_ dialogue, so you don't have to mark the spoken text as opposed to the other text. but in a novel, it's weird because if you write non-dialogue parts in dialect/colloquial phrasing/vernacular/AAVE/whatever, then you kind of have to make a concrete decision to do that, and it's usually framed in some way or another. "stream of consciousness" is one way to do it, definitely -- it sounds like an interesting approach. then i think of something like _the color purple_, which is also written mostly in AAVE, but it also contains a "justification": it's an epistolary novel whose letters are written by a woman without much formal education in 'standard' english.
i'm currently reading _sweet whispers, brother rush_, a YA novel from 1982 by virginia hamilton. it is interesting to me because the "frame" text is written in standard english, sometime very formally, but the viewpoint character is a fourteen-year-old girl whose dialogue is usually in (quite different-sounding) vernacular black english. it feels like a curious kind of register-switching, except the "switching" is really all in the conceit of communication between the author and the reader...
anyway, i am blathering! thank you for the suggestions. :)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-09-05 08:43 pm (UTC)there's something about "regular prose fiction" that makes writing in any kind of "dialect" complicated, i think. comics are neat (plays too, come to think of it) because they're _all_ dialogue, so you don't have to mark the spoken text as opposed to the other text. but in a novel, it's weird because if you write non-dialogue parts in dialect/colloquial phrasing/vernacular/AAVE/whatever, then you kind of have to make a concrete decision to do that, and it's usually framed in some way or another. "stream of consciousness" is one way to do it, definitely -- it sounds like an interesting approach. then i think of something like _the color purple_, which is also written mostly in AAVE, but it also contains a "justification": it's an epistolary novel whose letters are written by a woman without much formal education in 'standard' english.
i'm currently reading _sweet whispers, brother rush_, a YA novel from 1982 by virginia hamilton. it is interesting to me because the "frame" text is written in standard english, sometime very formally, but the viewpoint character is a fourteen-year-old girl whose dialogue is usually in (quite different-sounding) vernacular black english. it feels like a curious kind of register-switching, except the "switching" is really all in the conceit of communication between the author and the reader...
anyway, i am blathering! thank you for the suggestions. :)