Abstract
The aim of this paper is to reconstruct Carl Jung's theory of the collective unconscious to generate the signifying chameleon for reading Anglophone poetry. The signifying chameleon refers to a hybrid concept of poetry, which absorbs folk motifs of the unconscious collective and transforms them with Western poetic styles.
It, therefore, embodies the complexes of thematic and aesthetic configurations of Anglophone poetry writing and reception. In this essay I utilise aspects of Charles Pierce's Semiotics as support in highlighting and discussing the signifying chameleon, drawing sample poems from African American poetry.
I attempt to identify the signifying chameleon in Black poetry, not only to provide its textual applicability, but also to further build on the reusable theories of Jung and Gates. Hence, I am interested in sharing the structural linguistic nodes that are useful to develop a working grammar for the signifying chameleon-which straddles both the cultural unconscious and conscious acts.
This makes the concept both similar to and different from Louis Gates' Signifying Monkey. The signifying chameleon, in the main, moves past the Black tropes, deceit and playfulness which constitute Gates' theory and instead distil the way poetic writing and its analysis navigate through folk materials and mediate themes and styles in response to changing times and climes.
The concept and application of the signifying chameleon are significant to our understanding of thematic and aesthetic transitions through cultures and technologies. I note, also, that these signifying motifs foreground linguistic, cultural textual materiality and metaphoric repetitiveness in Anglophone poems.
I posit that the signifying chameleon shares literary affinity with the past heritage of the present poetics T. S.
Eliot expressed in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent."