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영어

This paper examines Jamaica Kincaid’s travel narrative Among Flowers (2005) and its intertextuality alongside her collection of essays on garden, My Garden (Book) (2001). As part of Kincaid’s “serial autobiography,” the two texts highlight her unstable position as a postcolonial and diasporic writer. On narrating ambition and desire to bring Himalayan nature into Vermont’s constructed garden to create an ideal idyll, Among Flowers reflects Kincaid’s multiple subjectivities as gardener, writer, and traveler that are foreshadowed in her previous garden essays in My Garden. Significant acts of gardening, writing, and traveling Kincaid lives for and by are foregrounded by Kincaid’s mobility as a transplanted self in the US and by performing multiple roles, Kincaid presents her ambivalent position between selves as an insider and outsider of Western exploitation, capitalism, and the legacy of colonialism. Focusing on the profound tension of Kincaid’s hybridity, this paper discusses multilayered narratorial self, a self in transit who cannot be pinned down to a singular identity although it might be vexed, conflicted, and disoriented. Thus, comparative reading of these two texts together will enhance a comprehensive understanding of Kincaid’s oeuvre.