Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity

摘要: In Split-Gut Song, Karen Jackson Ford looks at what it means to be African American, free, and creative by analyzing Jean Toomer's main body of work, specifically, his groundbreaking creation Cane. When first published in 1923, this pivotal work modernism was widely halled as inaugurating a truly artistic American literary tradition. Yet experiments form are consistently read terms political radicalism - protest uplift rather than radicalism. contextualizes poetry, letters, essays the culture period and, through close readings poems, shows how they negotlate formal experimentation (imagism, fragmentation, dialect) traditional forms (slave songs, field hollers, call-and-response sermons, lyric poetry). At heart is paradox that poetry both saving grace cannot survive modernity. This contradiction, argues, structures Cane, wherein flourishes, then falters, falls silent. The Toomer discovers Song complicated, contradictory poet who brings vexed experience ideas racial identity conventional experimental forms. Although has been labelled radical, argues politics peripheral experimental, stream-of-consciousness work. Rather exhibits he struggles articulate perplexed understanding race art 20th-century America.