The politics of monologist representation

Abstract EN

This article proffers a deconstructionist reading of the dramatic monologue and examines its rhetorical strategies and the politics of monologic representation, by which the first-person speaker/ monologist monopolizes discursive space and over-represents himself, while silencing other voices in the text and refusing them the freedom and space to express themselves.

Through a close analysis of monologist representation of the Other in various texts, including “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost, “Devonshire Street W.

1” by John Betjeman, as well as Ron Carlson’s short story “Bigfoot Stole My Wife” (albeit a dramatic monologue in prose), this article seeks to expose the ways in which the poetic persona is always partial, interested, and subjective, with not-so-subtle an agenda, a speaker who passes value judgments on the human objects of his overbearing tone.

By examining the politics of monologist representation against both Aristotelian ethos and Bakhtinian intonation, the article suggests that readers and critics can give voice to the voiceless in this elastic genre and abandon their sympathetic interpretations that practically absolve monologists of any bias towards their absent enemies or any politics of representation.