African American Canon and Criticism: Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988) examines the significance of the Signifying Monkey, a trickster figure in African folklore, and whose manner of speaking produces uncertainty and double meanings. He then examines how the specific language usage of the Signifying Monkey is altered and appears in African American texts by analyzing the trope of the talking book in early slave narratives and contemporary African American literary works. Gates’s book is hailed as one of the most original and groundbreaking works, and critics’ responses in its twenty-fifth-anniversary edition show its continuing impact. However, it has also been criticized for an intertextual and apolitical reading of slave narratives and for reproducing essentialism of Black literature. Focusing on the trope of the talking book, I examine how Gate’s theory and related contentions reveal critical issues of the African American literary tradition and problems of canon formation, regarding the concept of distinctive and coherent African American aesthetics, elitism, and its relationship with African American readers.
Abstract
Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988) examines the significance of the Signifying Monkey, a trickster figure in African folklore, and whose manner of speaking produces uncertainty and double meanings. He then examines how the specific language usage of the Signifying Monkey is altered and appears in African American texts by analyzing the trope of the talking book in early slave narratives and contemporary African American literary works. Gates’s book is hailed as one of the most original and groundbreaking works, and critics’ responses in its twenty-fifth-anniversary edition show its continuing impact. However, it has also been criticized for an intertextual and apolitical reading of slave narratives and for reproducing essentialism of Black literature. Focusing on the trope of the talking book, I examine how Gate’s theory and related contentions reveal critical issues of the African American literary tradition and problems of canon formation, regarding the concept of distinctive and coherent African American aesthetics, elitism, and its relationship with African American readers.
참고문헌 (24)
- Bragg, Beauty, "Reading Contemporary African American Literature: Black Women’s Popular Fiction, Post-Civil Rights Experience, and the African American Canon", pp.1~18 (2016), Lexington Books
- Cain, William E, "New Directions in Afro-American Literary Criticism", Review of The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. American Quarterly, 42(4), pp.657~663 (1990)
- Chiles, Katy, "From Writing the Slave Self to Querying the Human : The First Twenty-Five Years of The Signifying Monkey", Early American Literature, 50(3), pp.873~890 (2015)
- Conquergood, Dwight, "Rethinking Elocution : The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech", Text and Performance Quarterly, 20(4), pp.325~341 (2000)
- Ernest, John, "Economies of Identity : Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig", PMLA, 109(3), pp.424~438 (1994)
- Robert Elliot Fox, "Shaping an African American Literary Canon", Postmodern Culture, 9(1) (1998), Project Muse[DOI]
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, "Collected Black Women's Narratives", pp.7~22 (1988), Oxford UP
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, "The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader", pp.182~185 (2012), Basic Civitas Books
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, "The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism" (1989), Oxford UP
- Guillory, John, "Cultural Capital : The Problem of Literary Canon Formation" (1993), U of Chicago P
- Hogue, W. Lawrence, "The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History" (2003), State U of New York P
- Jarrett, Gene Andrew, "African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader", pp.1~22 (2006), New York UP
- Joyce, Joyce A, "The Black Canon : Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism", New Literary History, 18(2), pp.335~344 (1987)
- Kinnamon, Keneth, "Anthologies of African-American Literature from 1845 to 1994", Callaloo, 20(2), pp.461~481 (1997)
- Lubiano, Wahneema, "Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and African-American Literary Discourse", Review of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The New England Quarterly, 62(4), pp.561~572 (1989)
- McDowell, Deborah E, "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism", Black American Literature Forum, 14(4), pp.153~159 (1980)
- Mitchell, Angelyn, "Within the Circle : An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present" (1994), Duke UP
- Myers, D. G, "Signifying Nothing", New Criterion, 8, pp.61~64 (1990)
- Santamarina, Xiomara, "The Literary Theory of American Afro-centrism", Early American Literature, 50(3), pp.855~860 (2015)
- Smith, Jeanne Rosier, "Writing Tricksters : Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature" (1997), U of California P
- Spillers, Hortense J, "A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love", Feminist Studies, 9(2), pp.293~323 (1983)
- Spurlin, William J, "Theorizing Signifyin(g)and the Role of the Reader : Possible Directions for African-American Literary Criticism", African-American Criticism, 52(7), pp.732~742 (1990)
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (1994), W. W. Norton & Company
- Warren, Kenneth W, "To Make a Literature Black", Early American Literature, 50(3), pp.843~847 (2015)