WALLACE STEVENS AND RACIAL MELANCHOLY.
This essay uses Anne Anlin Cheng' s concept of racial melancholy to analyze Wallace Stevens' s poem "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," arguing that Stevens experiences the frustration of his ambition to be a representative poet when he finds himself confronted with an Africanist presence and i...
| Publicado en: | College Literature Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 385 - 396 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Johns Hopkins University Press
Summer2015
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| Sumario: | This essay uses Anne Anlin Cheng' s concept of racial melancholy to analyze Wallace Stevens' s poem "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," arguing that Stevens experiences the frustration of his ambition to be a representative poet when he finds himself confronted with an Africanist presence and its reminder of racial violence. As an instance of racial awareness in the context of white modernism, Stevens' s poem is exemplary as an immanent critique of the modernist ambition for the representative poet who can sustain celebrity. The essay argues that the poem models a kind of coldness that is calculated to make visible to readers the difficulties for a white poet as he affectively approaches an imaginative encounter with racial violence against an Africanist presence. |
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