Author(s)

Zichen Wen ¹, Rongying Zheng ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Department of Foreign Language, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, 100096, China

Corresponding Author

Zichen Wen

ABSTRACT

African American writer Alex Haley's Roots tells a story about the suffering of seven generations of his family in the context of race. The suffering experience has created the trauma of each generation. Although the experiences of each generation are different, they share a common theme of trauma, which is the resistance to slavery and racial oppression. The trauma of each generation has guiding significance for the next generation to face their own suffering. And the rebellious spirit of each generation in the face of trauma inspires the next generation. The inter-generational inheritance of trauma in the author's family makes the work an organic whole, which is one of the reasons why it has become a classic literature.

KEYWORDS

Roots; generational trauma; experience; Alex Haley

CITE THIS PAPER

Zichen Wen, Rongying Zheng, Study on Generational Traumas in Roots. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2024) Vol. 7: 9-15. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2024.070102.

REFERENCES

[1] Ball, Erica L and Kellie Carter Jackson. "Kunta Kinte: The Power of a Name" Transition, 122 (2017): 42-46.
[2] Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
[3] Foley, Barbara. "History, Fiction, and the Ground Between: The Uses of the Documentary Mode in Black Literature" PMLA, 95.3 (1980): 389-403.
[4] Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Liu Beicheng&Yang Yuanying trans. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2012.
[5] Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. USA: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997.
[6] Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Dell Publishing Co., INC., 1977.
[7] Pang Haonong. History of African American Literature: 1619-2010. Beijing: Central Compilation & Translation Press, 1995. 
[8] Yang Zhengrun. A Modern Poetics of Biography. Nanjing: Nanjing University Press, 2009.

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