Smiley, Jane - Mary Paniccia Carden (essay date 1997)

Mary Paniccia Carden (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: “Remembering/Engendering the Heartland: Sexed Language, Embodied Space, and America's Foundational Fictions in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres,” in Frontiers, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1997, pp. 181–202.

[In the following essay, Carden asserts that Smiley's A Thousand Acres exposes a cultural amnesia created by agrarian life in America that tends to forget and silence the stories of women.]

Benedict Anderson defines the modern nation as an “imagined community” that should be distinguished “not by [its] falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which [it is] imagined.”1 He suggests that we remember national history by forgetting, that in the process of producing and maintaining a coherent “imagined community,” a nation's past is mis-remembered. “Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances,” he proposes, “spring narratives.”2...

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