Culture and Education in Edward Paul Jones’s Fiction

Publish Year: 1394
نوع سند: مقاله کنفرانسی
زبان: English
View: 557

This Paper With 7 Page And PDF Format Ready To Download

  • Certificate
  • من نویسنده این مقاله هستم

استخراج به نرم افزارهای پژوهشی:

لینک ثابت به این Paper:

شناسه ملی سند علمی:

ICMHCONF01_005

تاریخ نمایه سازی: 25 بهمن 1394

Abstract:

Edward Paul Jones, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the novel The Known World and receiver of PEN/Hemingway Award for his first book Lost in the City, is an African American postmodern writer. Jones’s fiction-- The Known World, Lost in the City, and All Aunt Hagar's Children-- it is argued in this thesis, is an ample ground to analyze the two issues of education and culture. Methodologically, this study works across the two frameworks of African American studies and cultural studies. The theories of the African American theorist bell hooks about postmodernism/cultural studies and the condition of blacks constitute the main body of the theoretical issues discussed and employed in this thesis as hooks has thought profoundly and theorized amply about the issues of culture and education in relation to the history of black people. Moreover, her theories in this regard incorporate both of the above-mentioned frameworks. The main concern in bell hooks’ work is African American culture and education. Although Jones's fiction deals with the status of African American people; interestingly, it depicts culture as a means of educating and education as a means of culturizing. This mutual relationship is stated historically and challenged critically. Furthermore, Jones questions the enduring stereotypes and stereotypical discourses on black people in terms of the cultivation of values and teaching-learning policies. The easy-to-deal-with fiction of Jones can provide an appropriate site to look at African American people, their culture, and educational purposes from a different perspective. It is a locus where we can have a different picture of African American people who have been stereotypically represented in the literary contexts. Thus, black identity for Jones is not what has been previously made and shaped but something which is unique and distinct. For him, it is not only the white community that should be criticized but also blacks are to be held as responsible in their relation to whites. Though Jones tries to be unbiased in his representation of the black community, his neo-slave narrative represents a location wherein we encounter some possibilities that the so-called truthful documentation, history, does not allow us to encounter. Influenced by the discussions in postmodernism, Jones questions history, stereotypes on blacks, white oppression, and black conformity. But the point is that he makes blacks as both subject and object of representation rather than the ones who are the fillers of the gaps of the text. Moreover, Jones incorporates ontology and epistemology in his work as a means of questioning the existence of the world he depicts and the reliability of historical knowledge.