African American Canon and Criticism: Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey

• 발행기관: 한국아메리카학회
• 간행물 정보: 『미국학논집』제54집 1호, 99~116쪽, 전체 18쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 기타인문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2022.05.31

영문 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.

키워드

African American canon exclusivity Gates Signifying Monkey talking book