From the Margins to the Forefront: Tillie Olsen's Mediation as Figure and Author

Abstract

Tillie Olsen's life experiences and self-identification as a working class woman provide a strong basis for analyzing her fiction as partly autobiographical. As she wrote, she developed her position as a recognized and award winning author into that of a literary mediator for socially marginalized subjects, actively working to represent certain conditions of exclusion due to social, racial, economic, and sexual factors during the 1970's and 1980's. Through analysis of her fiction and non-fiction texts, her use of modernist writing techniques, her purpose as a writer, and her impact on the literary canon, it becomes possible to see how she has altered the literary landscape and has made those who suffer exclusion visible and legible.