Abstract
From the 20th century, with the women’s self-awakening, the great female writers began to go up on the literature stage in the second generation of southern renaissance, like Carson McCullers. Her literary talent is by no means inferior to the male writers. The fiction of Carson McCullers has variously been described as gothic, grotesque and bizarre. For her lively description of morbidity south common people, she was thought as the one of the representative southern America writers in southern gothic genre. The Ballad of Sad Cafe is the typical work to reveal the theme: the power of love still cannot solve the problem of solitary among the communicational obstruction. This paper will analyze the theme from the perspective of love and solitary, especially the chain gang in the end of the novel which is the code to reveal the truth of love and solitary. Therefore, we can deeply feel the longing of Carson McCullers’s love and agape.
Key Words
love; solitary; South Gothic Genre; morbid personality; Carson McCullers
摘要
从20世纪起,伴随着南方女性的自我意识觉醒,“南方文艺复兴”的第二代作家中出现了像卡森•麦卡勒斯这样的优秀女作家,其创作才华和众多的男性同行相比各有千秋,并毫不逊色。美国南方女作家卡森•麦卡勒斯的作品多被冠以哥特式、怪诞和古怪的标签,生动刻画着生理残缺和心理变态的南方平民,这一写作风格也使其成为了“南方哥特式小说”的代表作家。麦卡勒斯的作品大都表现着同一主题:人的孤独与难以沟通,纵然是爱的魔力也无法突破这巨大的隔阂。其中中篇小说《伤心咖啡馆之歌》是怪诞艺术的典范。本论文就将从卡森•麦卡勒斯的爱与孤独主题剖析《伤心咖啡馆》这部小说,尤其小说的结尾苦役队那十二个囚犯的歌声,这是麦卡勒斯小说的密码,也是她的全部魅力。通过对《伤心咖啡馆》的解读,可以感受到隐藏在作者深切孤独背后的博爱与对爱的呼唤。
关键词
爱;孤独;南方哥特式风格;病态人格;卡森﹒麦卡勒斯
Heroes in August Wilson’s Plays
Introduction
August Wilson (1945-2005) is one of the leading American playwrights of the late twentieth century. He came to theatrical prominence with his Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1984 and later in the same year went to Broadway where it enjoyed 275 performances and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Wilson enjoyed further successes with his subsequent works. In addition to two Pulitzers, for Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), Wilson also won other top drama awards, including a Tony for Fences and an Olivier, England’s Tony equivalent, for Jitney, five New Play Awards/Citations from the American Theatre Critics Association and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards. He is one of only seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzer Prizes, and one of only three African-American playwrights to receive the prize. Many critics and scholars believe Wilson is the fourth greatest playwright after Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller [1]. When he died in 2005, Broadway’s marquee lights dimmed for one minute.
Wilson highly values the African-American culture. In his keynote address “The Ground on Which I Stand” Wilson articulated his aesthetic and cultural identification with his mother and her ancestors, though his biological father is white [2].
Many scholars have discussed and provided some incisive insights about “this culture” presented in Wilson’s drama. The review of literature mainly deals with the studies that actually inform Wilson’s dramatic construction of African-American heroes.
In his book Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Emest J. Gaines and August Wilson, Keith Clark recognizes that “voice and community are the primary vehicles for black male authors’ reconceptualization of subjectivity” [3]. He starts with the black protest discourse represented by Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In this protest tradition, “Not only is the subject consigned to a veritable no-man’s-land with respect to white society, he maintains few if any connections with black men. The word ‘intimacy’ might aptly connote what is so painstakingly absent in black men’s relationships with each other. Being relegated to the position of the other by an intractable white environment, these protagonists subsequently impose this distinction upon themselves and their counterparts” [4]. In such a capriciously belligerent environment, the deoentered black male subject when seeking approbation from white dominant society finds his voice mediated, muted, and often silenced.
Though connected to black protest tradition, the spokesmen of the "NBA" (New Black Aesthetic)一James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson reimagine and rewrite black male subjectivity. Clark believes that Baldwin, Gaines and Wilson are earnestly concerned with the interiority of black men’s lives. They foreground and privilege the black subject’s overall relationship to a black speech community 一a nurturing, embryonic environment that give birth to the black male voice.
Harry J. Elam, Jr. in his book The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson makes some provocative claims about music, madmen and children, women, men and the Yoruban god Ogun in Wilson’s canon. Of particular relevance to this study is his meticulous analysis of racial madness and black masculinity. Elam defines racial madness as “a trope that became operative in clinical practice, literary creation, and cultural theory in the modem period as artists, critics and practitioners identified social and cultural roots for black psychological impairment” [5]. Recognizing double-consciousness, which “can cause social and psychological tensions for black subjects” [6],is a form of racial madness, Elam argues that this particular type of schizophrenia is not rooted in the race itself, “but that the conditions of modem African American life, the racism, alienation, and discrimination that black people face, induce a racial neurosis”.
Elam examines black masculinity in Wilson’s plays through detailed textual analysis of father-son relationship, prison politics and black-white dialectic within existent socio-economic system. To recover black masculinity through the problematic patriarch, Elam observes that the sons in Wilson’s cycle must learn to love and forgive, learn to remember “the `father’s story in ways that allow one to hold on but also to let go”.
The methodology used for this study is Afrocentric. This means the research will be guided by the cosmological, epistemological, axiological and aesthetic criteria of African-American culture. However, as heroism is a universal phenomenon as well and certain qualities may be shared by heroes of all cultures or races, theories on hero that are not formulated particularly from African-American perspective will also be considered for the analysis. They will serve either to enunciate the heroes’ general features or to provide a comparative/contrasting parameter to underscore unique African-American heroic values.
1. Translation Studies and Contrastive Text Linguistics
Translation is such a process that a form of expression in one language is transformed into its corresponding equivalence in another one. Translation practice is of a long history that could date back to the beginning of communication between different tribes in ancient time. As an academic subject, however, the study of translation has not come into being until the second half of the 20th century. In the year of 1972, James S. Holmes, in his article “The Name and Nature of Translation Studies”, officially brought forward the name of the scholarly study of translation, which was later known as Translation Studies.
1.1 Natures of Text Linguistics
Traditionally, text was regarded as a language unit above sentence. According to Basil Hatim, text is “a set of mutually relevant communicative functions that hang together to a particular context and thus achieve an overall rhetorical purpose. The minimal unit of text ……
1.1.1 Text Linguistics
Translation is such a process that a form of expression in one language is transformed into its corresponding equivalence in another one. Translation practice is of a long history that could date back to the beginning of communication between different tribes in ancient time. As an academic subject, however, the study of translation has not come into being until the second half of the 20th century……
Conclusion
A translation, coherent in both explicitness and implicitness, requires accurate and thorough analysis on the original as well as on the translation. Basil Hatim’s contrastive text linguistic theories have paved the way for translators to realize such analyzing process in terms of three dimensions of context. In his theories, tradition, al meta-functions of language and the concepts of genre, field and mode are combined together, which helps introduce the concept of intertexuality guaranteeing the text coherence.
The attempt of analyzing United Nations Millennium Declaration in this paper aims to apply Basil Hatim’s contrastive text linguistic theories in translation practice, especially in the area of political and diplomatic translation.
In concluding, translators should pay attention to avoid any loss of the ideational meaning when he or she conducts translation of a text according to its text type. Different from of literary translation, for instance, the intentionality of legal text is to thoroughly convey the ideational meaning of the original, even if it sometimes reads not so idiomatical. In the translation of United Nations Millennium Declaration, however, consideration has also been given to the accurate transfer of the interpersonal meaning, pragmatic equivalence by the translator who tackles this problem with appropriate shifts in the textual meaning of text.
Thus, from the whole analyzing process, Basil Hatim’s contrastive text linguistic analyzing approach is proved full of practicability as a theoretical framework. It helps the translator realize explicit and implicit coherence in translation based on fully understanding
References
[1] Molette, Carlton W. and Barbara J. Molette. Black Theatre: Premise and Presentation [M]. Bristol: Wyndham Hall Press, 1992: 39-41, 43, 47, 53.
[2] Adell, Sandra. Speaking of Ma Rainey [C]. Alan Nadel. May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1994: 51-66.
[3] 张美芳, 黄国文. 当代美国黑人剧作家奥古斯特·威尔逊作品中的历史再现[J]. 外国文学. 2003, 25 (3): 3, 5.
[4] Newmark, Peter. A Textbook of Translation [M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 1999: 117.
[5] Newmark, Peter. About Translation [M]. Clevdon: Multilingual Matters, 2008: 45-47
[6] Berlin, Ira, Marc Favreau, and Seven F. Miller. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom [M]. New York: The New Press, 1998: 15-16.
Acknowledgements
At end of this thesis, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, for his sincere support and precious suggestions throughout the process of preparing, drafting and revising this thesis. Without his insightful guidance, the accomplishment of this thesis would have been impossible.
I am also grateful to all the teachers who have taught me during my four-year study in the English department, School of Western Studies, Heilongjiang University, and who have given me so invaluable enlightenments that I can benefit through all my life.
At last, sincere thanks should also go to the Interpretation Section of the United Nations, especially Ms. Christian Landrein, for her great patience and always-in-time response to my questions. In addition, all the writers of those books and articles to which I have referred in the thesis should have my highest respect because without their previous researches full of diligence and intelligence, this thesis would have been based on no ground.