ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how Ralph Ellison deploys national culture in his early short stories for revealing his postcoloniality. In his Flying Home and Other Stories(1996), which was published after his death, Ellison combines African American folklore such as blues, spiritual and folktale with a form of western literature. The hybridization makes him succeed in rehabilitating black national culture which white America's racism and prejudice have previously rendered invisible. It is Ellison's firm belief that to reclaim the black national culture is to first decolonize the minds of blacks which have been alienated and repressed by a sense of double-consciousness and racial violence. Folklore and blues narration play an significant role in rescuing black culture from literary oblivion and makes it possible for Ellison to slip into the breaks of the contradictions of dominant western discourse, by engaging in a kind of semiotic guerrilla warfare. This paper mainly discusses the strategic use of folklore in Ellison's early short stories which has been relatively ignored by critics. The importance of short stories in Ellison's works is emphasized as a window through which the developing processes of Ellison's artistic and political imagination can be viewed. In his early fiction, Ellison effectively employs folklore in order to interrogate white dominant discourse and to detoxify the colonial mentality of African Americans. In a nutshell, Ellison's remembering folklore revives in the mind of young black generation the self-esteem of black culture and the infinite possibilities of cultural resistance. This analysis will be later extended to discussions of the later short stories of Ellison. This study also anticipates rediscovering his Invisible Man as a postnational and multicultural blues narrative.

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