Subversive Silences promises "to identify a poetics of combative silence" that is more than just the silence of historical forgetting or the silence of alternative stories. Weldt-Basson's introduction suggests that she is more interested in the communicative power of silences than in the traditional view that associates silence with "absence," repression, and a lack of voice or agency in the public sphere; she wants to explore the "power of silence." To this end, Weldt-Basson takes up various forms of silence or indirection in chapters on Marta Brunet and Maria Luisa Bombal (paradoxical silence) Rosario Castellanos (coding), Isabel Allende (hyperbolic silence), Rosario Ferre (symbolic silence), Laura Esquival (parodic silence), and Sandra Cisneros (cultural silence).
Weldt-Basson's approach is concerned with ethics -- that is, with how readers respond to texts, rather than solely with what the texts themselves "do." In this way, her approach shares much with recent work by Kimberly Nance or Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith -- work that wants to attend to how texts more (or do not move) their readers in particular ways.
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