Abstract

The significance of language and literacy in "Seventeen Syllables" as a means of disrupting and transforming modes of apprehension has not been fully examined. Yamamoto's emphasis on crossgenerational language and cultural acquisition in the Japanese American community lends itself especially well to an analysis that incorporates Mary Louise Pratt's ideas about language as "a device, precisely, for imagining community." Pratt's ideas help to illuminate the situation that occurs at the end of "Seventeen Syllables" when Tome Hayashi forges community with her daughter Rosie through the story of her illicit past and the violence, heartbreak, and constriction of her present.

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