Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language
In his collection of poems entitled Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) Langston Hughes observed and gave an original restitution of the historic evolution of African-American culture, a theme he reverted to again in 1961 with Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Both collections were, indeed, largely s...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
SAES
2018-11-01
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| Series: | Angles |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/angles/920 |
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| Summary: | In his collection of poems entitled Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) Langston Hughes observed and gave an original restitution of the historic evolution of African-American culture, a theme he reverted to again in 1961 with Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Both collections were, indeed, largely shaped by the impact of the transformation of black music as well as the hopes and dreams of African Americans. The theme of the American Dream and the possibilities for the black man to reach and accomplish this dream were recurrent in Hughes’s poetry, while the tension between the realities of the black experience and the unrealized dream provided the dynamic of his writing. By considering the poetic description of the living conditions of African Americans, my intent is to offer an analysis of the poet’s social lens to understand his vision of the American Dream for his people and how he addressed some of the most pressing social issues of his time. By analyzing Hughes’s poetic technique, I will also show how the poet rebuilt African-American history and led the reader to a process of “collective fiction”, typical of “minority writing”, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille Plateaux (1980). Through his specific technique, we will see Hughes’s writing is constantly on the edge of musical and written forms; an hypotext which bonds his poems to minority writing and minor literature. |
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| ISSN: | 2274-2042 |