穷白人文学对美国南方时空重塑的阶级解读

A class interpretation on reshaping space and time of American South by poor⁃white literature

20世纪80年代前后,美国南方穷白人文学崛起,这是历史上长期被忽视、消音的穷白人阶层首次从局内视角讲述自身生存故事,对南方进行重新审视与诠释,宣告中上阶层话语霸权的破产,暴露不公社会机制禁锢、压抑穷白人的历史真相。这个新文学体裁呈现出独特的时空体结构:一方面,前所未有地呈现南方乡村穷困、黯淡一面,解构中上阶层主观视角下浪漫闲适的田园乌托邦想象;另一方面,一改中上阶层拒斥现代文明的立场,在向城而生、向前展望的人生选择下,城市成为穷白人寻求发展、颠覆既有等级秩序的异托邦空间。穷白人构筑起“劳动阶级文学”话语,引发南方文学视角由上层权贵向贫民大众转变。

Around the 1980s,poor-white literature rose in American South,enabling the long neglected and silenced poor whites to tell their own story from the insiders’ perspective,and to reexamine and reinterpret the South,which proclaims the invalidity of upper-middle class discourse hegemony,and reveals the historical truth about the oppression poor whites suffered from the unfair social mechanism. This new literary genre presents a unique chronotope structure. On one hand,it unprecedentedly reproduces the poor and dark side of rural life,thus deconstructing the romantic idyllic utopia fabricated by the upper-middle class;on the other hand,as poor whites choose to strive for a living in cities and look forward to the future,different from the upper-middle class’ s rejection to modernization,an urban heterotopia for poor whites to subvert the existing hierarchical order is set up. Poor whites thus construct a working-class discourse,triggering the shift in southern literature from an aristocratic view to the poor folk perspective.