월트 휘트만과 랭스턴 휴즈의 상호텍스트성 연구

Abstract

In studying the literary relationship between Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman, Julia Kristeva's concept of intertextuality provides us with a new way to appreciate Hughes's creative originality. Without resorting to Harold Bloom's influence theory and depreciating Hughes's poetic originality, it allows us to analyze how he succeeds to Whitman actively reading his democratic vision of America and at the same time creating a new signifying process in which black people can recognize themselves as subjects. Mostly, Hughes's dialogical relationship with Whitman is materialized in justifying and supplementing Whitman's poetic vision of American Self and democratic ensemble. He accepts Whitman's linguistic experiment of the collective poetic subject and yet enhances it to the level of socio-linguistic activism by pointing out the ideological aspect inherent in the dominant white-male-centered language. By way of Whitman, he basically indicates the irony of black intelligentsia's “New Negro” cultural movement. For Hughes, such efforts to create a new image of black personality and promote black middle class values add nothing to positive self-consciousness of black people because it is impossible to construct a consistently positive black self on the symbolic system of white-centered culture in which black people exist as a lack. Ultimately, he moves beyond Whitman's language experiment by opening the boundary of his poetic text and encouraging readers to occupy freely the space of poetic subject. Readers, by performing Hughes's poems, bring in semiotic pulsion to refuse ideological social apparatuses including race, class, and gender, and become reborn as a new subject-in-process. In this respect Hughes clearly manifests what Mikhail Bakhtin calls “polyphony” in his poetic text and becomes the direct descendent of Whitman among other poets.