리타 더브의 흑인성과 보편성

Abstract

With her literary honors and achievements including many grants and fellowships, and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Rita Dove has established herself as a major figure in contemporary American poetry. Dove's poetry explores the history of the general human experience as well as the African-American experience. Dove's distinguishing feature is her ability to surrender historical facts to greater truth. Thus, she discovers meanings of particular history, from which universal meanings are explored. That is, in her works, the particularities are examined in terms of the universalities and vice versa. Dove has been praised for her international aesthetic vision. Although she is an African American female writer, she refuses to define herself only in terms of blackness. With strong European backgrounds, she has pursued the more vast world which is not restricted to only blackness for her poetic subject matter, theme, and characters. Some of her poems, therefore, are written under international settings and history, and even the titles of the poems imply the universalities of her works. Some of her poems of course contain the black history and experience which underline her overall poetics. She, however, does not allow one story to be told. She combines private and public history, particular and universal history, which results from her awareness of both her racial history and human history. By appropriating the both histories, Dove develops a more inclusive voice to tell two stories of the world.