In the border of saying: the epigraphs in Sandra Cisneros's narrative

Abstract

This article aims at exploring the enunciative-discursive construction and function of epigraphs in Sandra Cisneros's narrative work. This Chicana writer's fiction evidences a particular constitutive encounter between English and Spanish. Cisneros resorts to the gaps which result as of this linguistic and cultural contact, producing a new discursive space in the gaps, which amounts to a new way of saying, making her literary voice distinct to the reader. According to our hypothesis, epigraphs are small (para) texts which account for a direct or alluded presence of Spanish and emerge as sites of interlingual heterogeneity as they take part of different processes of linguistic-cultural negotiation and translation, which configure both a certain discursive image or ethos of the locutor responsible for the global enunciation.