SOURCE: Phelan, James. “Sandra Cisneros's ‘Woman Hollering Creek’: Narrative as Rhetoric and as Cultural Practice.” Narrative 6, no. 3 (October 1998): 221-35.

In the following essay, Phelan utilizes the dialogue form in order to explore the relationship between “Woman Hollering Creek,” Phelan's rhetorical analysis, and the cultural criticism found in The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau.

Note: This essay emerged out of my efforts to think about the relations among Sandra Cisneros's moving story, “Woman Hollering Creek,” the kind of rhetorical analysis I have done in the past, and the kind of cultural criticism suggested by de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. I have adopted the dialogue form in order to avoid a false synthesis of the two approaches and to convey instead their sometimes converging, sometimes diverging, sometimes complementary perspectives. Although Cisneros is not an explicit speaker in this dialogue, I have assumed that “Woman Hollering...