Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of
Chiaroscuro, Delaney's Aesthetic Vision, and Baldwin's “Sonny's Blues”
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Published:January 2025
In this chapter, D. Quentin Miller argues that James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny's Blues” was published at a point in his career when his attention to visual aesthetics was catalyzed and refined by Beauford Delaney. Reframing “Sonny’s Blues” in terms of its visual elements both affords a deeper understanding of Delaney’s influence on Baldwin and highlights the story’s essential concerns with the revelation of a complex psychological self. The complete self emerges through the interplay of lightness and dark, metaphorical indicators of the interplay between surface (the facets of others that we perceive) and depth (the mysterious facets hidden in one’s private interior). Chiaroscuro, the painting technique that corresponds to this verbal play, is at its core an artistic emphasis on the contrast and interplay of light and darkness to reveal depth and dimension.
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