Domestic Work:Time And Space In Natasha Trethewey’s History Writing

The Poet Laurent Natasha Trethewey(1966—) is one of the most important contemporary African American poets who has published five works. In Domestic Work, her first collection of poems which won inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize, with her scrupulous capture of and earnest reflection on details of black people’s life and work, Trethewey shows her attention on the history and present situation of African Americans as an African American female poet. The thesis analyzes the history writing strategies of Trethewey in Domestic Work from the perspective of time, space and the relationship between time and space to summarize the history consciousness of Trethewey and her self-identification as an African American poet.The thesis is divided into the following six chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to the poet Natasha Trethewey, the collection of poems Domestic Work, the studies that have done abroad and at home and the structure of this thesis.The second part analyzes time in history writing in Domestic Work, which includes the strategies of Trethewey to bring the past to the present and how she presents these moments in her poems, to discover the time sense in her history writing which is the combination of the past and the present and the discontinuity of time.The third chapter focuses on space in history writing in Domestic Work. By dividing space in Domestic Work into private and public space and summarizing the spatial distribution of black people, this chapter analyzes how Natasha Trethewey reveals the true and comprehensive black life and the relationship between black people and white people.The fourth chapter dwells on the spatialization of time from the relationship between time and space. The spatialization of time is manifested in the texualization of history to study the fragmented and open history and in the superimposition of time in textual space and real space in this chapter.Based on the study above, the fifth chapter concludes the history consciousness of Natasha Trethewey and her self-identification as a poet. From her time sense analyzed in the second chapter and the spatialization of time analyzed in the fourth chapter, it can be seen that Natasha Trethewey treats the history as a living one. From the space sense analyzed in the third chapter, Natasha Trethewey’s combination of familial memory and community history can be concluded. Through the history writing and history consciousness of Natasha Trethewey, this section digs the start angle of her creation and her self-identification as a poet. Putting Trethewey in the whole picture of African literature, the sections analyzes Trethewey’s inheritance and development of her predecessors such as Langston Hughes as a member of contemporary African American writers.The conclusion gives a summary of the thesis. Natasha Trethewey, as an American poet, writes about the history of African American not only to make the black people know more about and inherit the history of African American but also for all the American people to know more about the history of their country. The history writing of Trethewey is not only for the past but also for the present and for the future.