Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills

TLDR: The ten-line epigraph to Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills as discussed by the authors provides a highly suggestive study in the uses of metonymy and its form may be defined as dialogical.

Abstract: Extracted from the ten-line epigraph to Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, the fout lines quoted above provide a highly suggestive study in the uses of metonymy. To understand that they distil the essence of the full dialogue between adult and child one need do little more than tead the rest of the epigraph. But to appreciate how they prefigure larger novelistic issues and strategies, how they suggest the genetic and structural nature of Naylot's project requires rather more deliberate attention to successive readings and a sustained search for appropriate critical and theoretical tools. In both form and content the epigraph fotegtounds specific fotmal and ideological qualities of the novel that link it to the tradition of gothic fiction. The explicit references to feat and hell and the implicit resonances of paradox and ambivalence suffice to establish gothic intimations. The sharply dramatized angles of vision represented by the respective voices of gtandmothet and grandchild enact those differences in discursive modalities and semantic intelligence which broadly define intertextuality (Zutbrugg 254). In addition, because the epigraph also prefigures Naylor's strategy of opposing divergent verbal/textual categoties and their implicit assumptions, its form may be defined as dialogical. The ensuing discussion will therefore draw