Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter: A Rhetorical Approach to Memory and Identity Crisis
Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter: A Rhetorical Approach to Memory and Identity Crisis

Summary/Abstract: Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter (2003) delves into the issue of narrative as a means of self-expression and construction of meaning and a discursive condition for remembering and retelling stories of self and society. In the light of David Herman’s view of stories as emanations from “cultural understandings of emotion”, this study intends to explore ways of Self-/sense-making in a world in profound crisis. Shah’s novel provides models of the world through stories, exploring the relation between personal and collective experience. Accounts of wartime Afghanistan and of different selves in different cultural milieux give the story a strong rhetorical force which challenges the reader cognitively, emotionally and ethically.

• Details
• Contents