Earticle

초록

영어

In reading African literature, as in consuming any text cross-culturally, we encounter more than the ranges and plays of meanings which the text as figure has from its author and that author’s cultural context; we encounter, too, our own habits of categorization and configuration, of reading between figure and ground, text and context. Cross-cultural reading is as much a process of interpreting ourselves－of reading across, not merely through, our own frames of references－as it is of interpreting texts and their (alien) contexts. Emecheta’s version of human reality resists overtly utopian visions: life is inherently problematic, troubled by tensions that cannot be resolved. The site of these tensions, however, is the only opportunity that we have to act on and fulfill our humanity－whatever that might turn out to be. Emecheta’s ironies argue a resistance to the alienating dichotomies, typified by the Cartesian split, that characterize “modern” culture, and which enable the various rationalizations, alienations and exploitations that that culture is built on. As we have seen, the crossing and interaction of these spheres in Emecheta’s narratives, rather than multiplying the possibilities open to her characters. It seems possible, however, that in considering the effect of multiple marginalizations, we might learn to shift our focus from the multiply crossed-out, multiply bound space that remains within the frame of the cultural crossings and crossings-out of the human. Although Emecheta offers no utopian vision, her literary production argues for the presence of a genuine humanity which exists at the margins; there is in Emecheta’s fictions an implicit argument for “life outside the text,” for an “ungraspable middle space” in which the paradoxical effort to figure the unfigurable, in fiction or in life, is at once unavoidable and good.

목차

Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Kim Uirak [ 김의락 | Busan University of Foreign Studies ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810