Deconstruction Of Power In Gwendolyn Brooks's Poetry

Gwendolyn Brooks makes remarkable literary achievements as an African American female poet in contemporary American academia.Inspired by real life of the black living in Chicago ghetto,Brooks integrates her considerable concern on racial issues and unique expression techniques into her poetic works.In regard to themes,Brooks attempts to represent extreme predicament of the black subject to oppression and discrimination.As to the language,she resolves to voice her aspiration through plain words,rhythmic forms and delicate structure.Most researches at home and abroad focus on biographical criticism,ethnic concern and feminist analysis while few critics apply Deconstructivism to interpreting power theme in Brooks' s poetry.This thesis will dig into the subversion of anthropocentric,ethnic and patriarchal power in Brooks' s racial poems in light of Deconstructivism.Deconstructivism was put forward by Jacques Derrida in the 1960 s.This theory opposes structuralism,emphasizes disintegration of the logocentrism,advocates the criticism and subversion of traditional western metaphysics.Thus,the absolute power of western hierarchical order is overturned and removed from mainstream discourse.Power,as a central concept,will be categorized into anthropocentric authority,white supremacy and male chauvinism to be subverted on account of the interpenetration of binary opposition.Binary opposition is composed of a pair of relative words with superordinate and subordinate meaning.Interpenetration refers to the commonality between the originally contrastive concepts.The inner relations discovered in binary pairs facilitates the subversion of authoritative status of human,male and white race.The thesis is made up of five chapters.The first chapter gives a brief overview of Gwendolyn Brooks' s poetic works and Deconstructivism raised by Derrida,accompanied by a literature review for domestic and foreign researches on Brooks so as to illustrate the feasibility of the research.The second chapter mainly explores the disintegration of anthropocentric authority by posing the consistency between human beings and animals in terms of cultural reference and living conditions,and reveals the realistic dilemma of the black afflicted to racial oppression.The third chapter focuses on the coherence between white and black community from the perspective ofpolitical attitude and social morality so as to subvert white supremacy.Brooks not only recognizes the positive attempts of the black to fight against racism,but she also reveals the pervasive changes of the black in value orientation throughout the colonial history.The fourth chapter explores the disorganization of male chauvinism with a view to the interchange of social roles and spiritual estrangement,and highlights the rise of females' awareness of independence and the promotion of their social status.In the last chapter,the whole thesis comes to a conclusion with a restatement of the major theme.And Brooks also reveals her encouragement of racial integration among ethnic groups.