ABSTRACT
This chapter showcases how Grace Paley relates the potency of dialogue within the lifeworld to larger public appeals for social justice. In short fiction that focuses on traditionally underrepresented subjects like single, working-class mothers and children, Paley advances an ethos of communicability through storytelling, a practice she believes can “give counsel” to contemporary subjects despite the atomizing effects of urban life. Paley represents storytelling as a collaborative dialogue that consociates teller and listener, inviting revelations and opinions that motivate tentative speakers to demand forms of material and emotional support previously withheld from them. With an idiosyncratic style that eschews quotation marks, character names, and forms of interiority that traditionally distinguish subjects in fiction, Paley instead uses dialogue as the dominant register by which her characters become known to us. Setting her stories in the parks and stoop culture of New York’s Lower East Side, she thus renders women and children visible by what they have to say rather than how they are seen.
