This thesis aims to investigate the black church and black community in James Baldwin¡¦s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Particularly, it probes how and why the religion, namely Christianity, casts a loaded shadow for African Americans. I argue that Baldwin, on the one hand, vigorously illustrates a bodily pious black community by bombarding us with heaps of biblical texts and church songs; on the other hand, he serenely indicts a spiritually hollow black church by narrating a blues-like comically sad tone. I discuss Baldwin¡¦s relentless wrestle with God in Chapter One. I suggest reading Go Tell It on the Mountain together with Baldwin¡¦s essay, The Fire Next Time, to flesh out the weighty issue of religion in the text. Since black community and black church generally symbolizes each other in the early history of Africa American lives, I make a detour to explore the emergence and development of the Black Church in Chapter Two. It is also an attempt to explain how the white God in the U.S.A. becomes black and how and why black community eventually accepts the then indifferent God to be their own. In Chapter Three, I look into the importance (and impotence) of the epitome of black community¡XHarlem¡Xin terms of its geographical location, position, and structure within the capitalist metropolis, New York. This chapter travels with John Grimes, the protagonist, to see the white man¡¦s world and to investigate the impossibility and oxymoron of ¡§black flâneur.¡¨ Then I discuss in Chapter Four the performing arts of the Black Church, as well as the secular music outside of the Black Church. Baldwin intelligently borrows God¡¦s spear and shield¡Xthe language in the Bible and the music played inside (and later outside) the Black Church¡Xas his writing tool to tell a gospel-like parable. At last, I would conclude that GTIM serves as a parable of the secular world for Baldwin has sung a blues gospel to the world.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0806109-002400 |
| Date | 06 August 2009 |
| Creators | Lee, Chun-Man |
| Contributors | Shuli Chang, Tee Kim Tong, Hsinya Huang |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0806109-002400 |
| Rights | off_campus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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