『砂糖きび』におけるアフロ・アメリカン的「語り」

概要

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Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is known as early Afro-American avant-garde work in the Harlem Renaissance. Cane's originality mainly resides in its form: at first glance, it seems a collection of verse, stories, and plays, and most pieces are written in the combination of literary forms, especially that of lyric poetry and drama, yet there seems to be a thematic unity. The unity of the work is explainable by an Afro-American tradition of "storytelling." Cane begins with the image of the sunset and ends with the scene of the sunrise, symbolizing "night" as the time of storytelling in the Afro-American communities. Since Toomer reworks the form of telling folk tales in the Afro-American communities into the literary form, some works begin and end with songs or poems, and tricksters of the Afro-American folk tales are seen in Cane. The ending of Cane is the scene of the sunrise and the rebirth of Afro-Americans by a trickster, which symbolizes "open-ending." In spite of these Afro-American characters of the text, narrative of Cane reveals differences and conflicts caused by their own skincolor consciousness and throws the irony of the racial dichotomy of black and white, which is Afro-American rhetorical strategy, "signifying."
2000-12-20