할렘 르네상스에서의 진 투머의 위상

The Place of Jean Toomer in the Harlem Renaissance: Racial Shame or Racial Pride

The purpose of this paper is to explore the significance of Jean Toomer in American literary history, making connections with the Harlem Renaissance. Although he is considered the harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance, Jean Toomer has not been frequently discussed within the context of English literary scholarship in Korea. His work Cane (1923) is an important text that has significantly influenced both white and black writers. Cane, which is a potpourri of poems, personal sketches, short stories, and a play, deals with the complex lives of black people living in both the North and the South. As a light-skinned black writer, Toomer is vacillated between the white world and the black world, experiencing an identity crisis. Toomer was not only associated with the black writers from the Harlem in the 1920s, he also interacted with white literary figures such as Waldo Frank, Hart Crane, and Sherwood Anderson, among others. In Cane, Toomer attempts to show the suffering and frustration of the black people living in the North and the South, imagining a de-racialized America. The thematic and structural circularity in Cane shows his desire to transcend the contradictions of American society. Toomer wishes to overcome the dichotomy between the North and the South, urban and rural, mind and body, white and black, and man and woman, along with other binary oppositions. Toomer successfully represents the beauty and terror of 1920s America more accurately and mystically than any other writer from that period. Considering his role in the Harlem Renaissance, Toomer should be evaluated not only as an important writer from a specific time and place, but rather as a central figure emblematic of 1920s American modernism.