题   目： The Role of Music in the African American Poetry Tradition

讲座人： Lauri Ramey

 ( 加州州立大学洛杉矶分校教授，华中师范大学客座教授 )

时   间： 3 月 29 日（周三）下午 2 ： 00—3:30

地   点：外语楼 101 会议室

 

讲座内容：Since the genre’s beginnings, African American poetry has been integrally connected to music. This tradition originated with spirituals, which are the sung poems created by enslaved African Americans sometime around the 17th century. Spirituals brought together disparate groups of enslaved Africans, who came from multiple oral cultures, and spoke diverse languages, in a literary tradition of their own making. At the advent of Modernism, Paul Laurence Dunbar, who is often regarded as the first African American Man of Letters, stated that his goal was to “be able to interpret my own people through song and story…”as he repurposed the spirituals for the 20th century and beyond. This lecture examines the historical and aesthetic roles of the spirituals and Dunbar as the founding forces of this literary tradition where music and language are inextricably bound. 

 

个人简介：Lauri Ramey is Professor of English and founding Director of the Presidentially Chartered Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles. She has served as guest professor at the American University of Armenia and Goldsmiths College (University of London), and currently serves as guest professor at Central China Normal University, Yunnan Normal University, and Henan Polytechnic University. She has published nearly 100 peer reviewed articles and book chapters for presses such as Cambridge University Press and Routledge. She is the author or editor of six books, including Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry, The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962-1975.