Complex Pastoralism in an Age of Technological Transformation: Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Poetics of Racial Untranslatability
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
Jean Toomer’s Cane has long been recognized as a singular work of American modernism, mixing prose, lyric poetry, black spirituals, and drama to forge an aesthetic search for African American self-realization. In staging the failure of black characters to achieve this by rooting themselves in the soil and rustic life of Georgia, I argue, Cane enacts a complex pastoralism, which focalizes the dissonant and pervasive doubleness of black life in an age of technological transformation. With bifurcations that include African and American, past and present, rural and urban, South and North, black vernacular speech and standardized English writing, Toomer ironizes and racializes the longing for an unspoiled Arcadia that might redress the insufficiencies of the present. In the face of the racialized forces of modernization and industrialization, which threaten to translate black consciousness and aspirations into a single idiom, Toomer insists on a writing that maintains intimate contact with the contradictions and particularities of black life, forging complexities that resist translation and subvert unexamined American myths of exceptionalism and progress. Ultimately, African American self-realization remains unachieved in Cane; its complex pastoralism reveals this open-ended project requires inventively affirming the antitheses of modern black life, defiantly asserting its singularity and untranslatability.
Abstract
Jean Toomer’s Cane has long been recognized as a singular work of American modernism, mixing prose, lyric poetry, black spirituals, and drama to forge an aesthetic search for African American self-realization. In staging the failure of black characters to achieve this by rooting themselves in the soil and rustic life of Georgia, I argue, Cane enacts a complex pastoralism, which focalizes the dissonant and pervasive doubleness of black life in an age of technological transformation. With bifurcations that include African and American, past and present, rural and urban, South and North, black vernacular speech and standardized English writing, Toomer ironizes and racializes the longing for an unspoiled Arcadia that might redress the insufficiencies of the present. In the face of the racialized forces of modernization and industrialization, which threaten to translate black consciousness and aspirations into a single idiom, Toomer insists on a writing that maintains intimate contact with the contradictions and particularities of black life, forging complexities that resist translation and subvert unexamined American myths of exceptionalism and progress. Ultimately, African American self-realization remains unachieved in Cane; its complex pastoralism reveals this open-ended project requires inventively affirming the antitheses of modern black life, defiantly asserting its singularity and untranslatability.
참고문헌 (18)
- Arbour, Robert, "Figuring and Reconfiguring the Folk: Women and Metaphor in Part 1 of Jean Toomer’s Cane", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 55(3), pp.307~327 (2013)
- Baker, Houston A., Jr., "Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance" (1987), U of Chicago P
- Beal, Wesley, "The Form and Politics of Networks in Jean Toomer’s Cane", American Literary History, 24(4), pp.658~679 (2012)
- Empson, William, "Some Versions of Pastoral" (1974), New Directions
- Farebrother, Rachel, "‘Adventuring through the Pieces of a still Unorganized Mosaic’: Reading Jean Toomer’s Collage Aesthetic in Cane", Journal of American Studies, 40(3), pp.503~521 (2006)
- Farland, Maria, "Modernist Versions of Pastoral: Poetic Inspiration, Scientific Expertise, and the ‘Degenerate’ Farmer", American Literary History, 19(4), pp.905~936 (2007)
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, "The Signifying Monkey : A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism" (1988), Oxford UP
- Kodat, Catherine Gunther, "To ‘Flash White Light from Ebony’: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane", Twentieth Century Literature, 46(1), pp.1~19 (2000)
- Locke, Alain, "Preface to The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance", pp.3~16 (1992), Touchstone
- MacKethan, Lucinda H, "Cane", pp.229~237 (1988), Norton
- Marx, Leo, "The Machine in the Garden : Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America" (1970), Oxford UP
- Ramsey, William M., "Jean Toomer’s Eternal South", The Southern Literary Journal, 36(1), pp.74~89 (2003)
- Robles, Francisco E., "Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Borderlands of Encounter and Contradiction", MELUS, 45(1), pp.27~48 (2020)
- Schaffer, Donald M., Jr, "‘When the Sun Goes Down’: The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Jean Toomer’s Cane", The Southern Literary Journal, 45(1), pp.111~128 (2012)
- Scruggs, Charles, "Jean Toomer and Kenneth Burke and the Persistence of the Past", American Literary History, 13(1), pp.41~66 (2001)
- Stasi, Paul, "A ‘Synchronous but More Subtle Migration’: Passing and Primitivism in Toomer’s Cane", Twentieth Century Literature, 55(2), pp.145~174 (2009)
- Toomer, Jean, "Cane" (1988), Norton
- Webb, Jeff, "Literature and Lynching: Identity in Jean Toomer’s Cane", ELH, 67(1), pp.205~228 (2000)