토니 모리슨의 『빌러비드』에서 흑인 문학 전통 읽기

Reading the African American Literary Traditions in Toni Morrison's Beloved

This paper attempts to read Toni Morrison's Beloved by identifying the African American literary traditions reflected in the text, Beloved needs to be read in conjunction with those African American literary texts that preceded and influenced Morrison's text, In Beloved, Morrison signifies or revises various "lropes" borrowed from both the oral and the written African American literature, As Henry Louis Gates, Jr, elaborates in The Signifying Monkey, "signifying" indicates a form of intertextual revision, by which texts establish their relation to other texts, and authors to other authors, In this sense, Morrison signifies on many well-known antebellum slave narratives as well as early African American novels written by both male and female authors, In particular, Zora Neale Hurston plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between the nineteenth-century African American female authors and those of the late twentieth century, Hurston's influence on Morrison's novel cannot be overemphasized, Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, signifies on the slave narratives written by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, while Morrison, in Beloved, signifies on Hurston's seminal text, As a writer, Morrison focuses on recovering the literary traditions of African American women and speaks for all those black women who are 'disremembered and unaccounted for."