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Wrestling Angels Into Song
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Book Synopsis Wrestling Angels into Song by : Herman Beavers
Download or read book Wrestling Angels into Song written by Herman Beavers and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-08-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison's influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers. For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.
Book Synopsis Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture by : David Deutsch
Download or read book Queer Angels in Post-1945 American Literature and Culture written by David Deutsch and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Allen Ginsberg's 'angel-headed hipsters' to angelic outlaws in Essex Hemphill's Conditions, angelic imagery is pervasive in queer American art and culture. This book examines how the period after 1945 expanded a unique mixture of sacred and profane angelic imagery in American literature and culture to fashion queer characters, primarily gay men, as embodiments of 'bad beatitudes'. Deutsch explores how authors across diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, including John Rechy, Richard Bruce Nugent, Allen Ginsberg, and Rabih Alameddine, sought to find the sacred in the profane and the profane in the sacred. Exploring how these writers used the trope of angelic outlaws to celebrate men who rebelled wilfully and nobly against religious, medical, legal and social repression in American society, this book sheds new light on dissent and queer identities in postmodern American literature.
Book Synopsis The Romance of Authenticity by : Jeff Karem
Download or read book The Romance of Authenticity written by Jeff Karem and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To what extent has the demand for a vicarious experience of other cultures fuelled the expectation that the most important task for writers is to capture and convey authentic cultural material? This text argues that authenticity is in fact a restrictive category of literary judgment.
Book Synopsis From the Plantation to the Prison by : Tara T. Green
Download or read book From the Plantation to the Prison written by Tara T. Green and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to George Jackson, black men born in the US are conditioned to accept the inevitability of being imprisoned.... "Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortune that led so many black men to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments." As Jackson writes from his prison cell, his statement may seem to be only a product of his current status. However, history proves his point. Indeed, some of the most well-known and respected black men have served time in jail or prison. Among them are Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Frederick Douglass. This book is an examination of the various forms that imprisonment, as asocial, historical, and political experience of African Americans, has taken. Confinement describes the status of individuals who are placed within boundaries-either seen or unseen-but always felt. A word that suggests extensive implications, confinement describes the status of persons who are imprisoned and who are unjustly relegated to a social status that is hostile, rendering them powerless and subject to the rules of the authorities. Arguably, confinement appropriately describes the status of African Americans who have endured spaces of confinement, which include, but are not limited to plantations, Jim Crow societies, and prisons. At specific times, these "spaces of confinement" have been used to oppress African Americans socially, politically, and spiritually. Contributors examine the related experiences of Malcolm X, Bigger Thomas of Native Son, and Angela Davis.
Book Synopsis Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama by : Keith Clark
Download or read book Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama written by Keith Clark and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrating the extraordinary versatility of African-American men's writing since the 1970s, this forceful collection illustrates how African-American male novelists and playwrights have absorbed, challenged, and expanded the conventions of black American writing and, with it, black male identity. From the "John Henry Syndrome"--a definition of black masculinity based on brute strength or violence--to the submersion of black gay identity under equations of gay with white and black with straight, the African-American male in literature and drama has traditionally been characterized in ways that confine and silence him. Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama identifies the forces that limit black male discourse, including traditions established by iconic African-American male authors such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. This thoughtful volume also shows how contemporary black male authors use their narratives to put forward new ways of being and knowing that foster a more complete sense of self and more humane and open ways of communicating with and relating to others. In the work of Charles Johnson, Ernest Gaines, and August Wilson, contributors find paths toward broader, less rigid ideas of what black literature can be, what the connections among individual and communal resistance can be, and how black men can transcend the imprisoning models of hyper masculinity promoted by American culture. Seeking greater spiritual connection with the past, John Edgar Wideman returns to the folk rituals of his family, while Melvin Dixon and Brent Wade reclaim African roots and traditions. Ishmael Reed struggles with a contemporary cultural oppression that he sees as an insidious echo of slavery, while Clarence Major's experimental writing suggests how black men might reclaim their own voices in a culture that silences them. Taking in a wide range of critical, theoretical, cultural, gender, and sexual concerns, Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama provides provocative new readings of a broad range of contemporary writers.
Book Synopsis Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison by : Herman Beavers
Download or read book Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Herman Beavers and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Toni Morrison’s fiction as a sustained effort to challenge the dominant narratives produced in the white supremacist political imaginary and conceptualize a more inclusive political imaginary in which black bodies are valued. Herman Beavers closely examines politics of scale and contentious politics in order to discern Morrison's larger intent of revealing the deep structure of power relations in black communities that will enable them to fashion counterhegemonic projects. The volume explores how Morrison stages her ruminations on the political imaginary in neighborhoods or small towns; rooms, houses or streets. Beavers argues that these spatial and domestic geographies are sites where the management of traumatic injury is integral to establishing a sense of place, proposing these “tight spaces” as sites where narratives are produced and contested; sites of inscription and erasure, utterance and silence.
Book Synopsis Sissy Insurgencies by : Marlon B. Ross
Download or read book Sissy Insurgencies written by Marlon B. Ross and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.
Book Synopsis Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction by : M. Hurst
Download or read book Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction written by M. Hurst and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on critical frameworks, this study establishes the centrality of language, gender, and community in the quest for identity in contemporary American fiction. Close readings of novels by Alice Walker, Ernest Gaines, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, and Rudolfo Anaya, among others, show how individuals find their American identities.
Book Synopsis Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction by : Philip Page
Download or read book Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction written by Philip Page and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a reaction against persistent black exclusion from white American society, the novels of recent African American writers boldly celebrate the heritage of black culture. They acclaim a people once dispersed by racism and humiliation but now restoring its legacy of rich community life. For close examination of this theme Philip Page brings together five novelists who are in the forefront of contemporary fiction and shows how their voices combine for an ongoing dialogue on the importance of community to the African American world. Gaining its special force through addressing national concerns and through never backing away from the truth in the face of stubborn opposition, the fiction of Gaines, Naylor, Johnson, Cade-Bambara, and Wideman contributes to postmodernist debates on race, the repressed past, and the contemporary American conscience.
Book Synopsis The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature by : Steven R. Serafin
Download or read book The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature written by Steven R. Serafin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 1340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than ten years in the making, this comprehensive single-volume literary survey is for the student, scholar, and general reader. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature represents a collaborative effort, involving 300 contributors from across the US and Canada. Composed of more than 1,100 signed biographical-critical entries, this Encyclopedia serves as both guide and companion to the study and appreciation of American literature. A special feature is the topical article, of which there are 70.
Book Synopsis Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature by : Jeffrey B. Leak
Download or read book Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature written by Jeffrey B. Leak and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The portrayal of black men in our national literature is controversial, complex, and often contradictory."In Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature, Jeffrey B. Leak identifies some of the long-held myths and stereotypes that persist in the work of black writers from the nineteenth century to the present--intellectual inferiority, criminality, sexual prowess, homosexual emasculation, and cultural deprivation. Utilizing Robert B. Stepto's call-and-response theory, Leak studies four pairs of novels within the context of certain myths, identifying the literary tandems between them and seeking to discover the source of our culture's psychological preoccupation with black men. Calling upon interdisciplinary fields of study--literary theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, legal theory, and queer theory--Leak offers ground breaking analysis of both canonical texts (representing the "call" of the call-and-response dyad) and texts by emerging writers (representing the "response"), including Frederick Douglass and Charles Johnson: Ralph Ellison and Brent Wade; Richard Wright and Ernest J. Gaines; and Toni Morrison and David Bradley. Though Leak does not claim that the "response" tests are superior to the "call' texts, he does argue that, in some cases, the newer work--such as charles Johnson's "Oxherding Tale--can address a theme or offer a narrative innovation not found in preceding texts, such as "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas. In these instances, argues Leak, the newer texts constitute not only a response to the call text, but a substantial revision. Leak offers the first in-depth criticism of black masculinity in a range of literary texts. In a final chapter, he expands his discussion to the emerging field of black masculinity studies, pointing to future directions for study, including memoir, film, drama, and others. Poised on the brink of exciting new trends in scholarship, "Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature is flagship work, enhancing the understanding of literary constructions of black masculinity and the larger cultural imperatives to which these writers are reacting.
Book Synopsis The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story by : Blanche H. Gelfant
Download or read book The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story written by Blanche H. Gelfant and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-21 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as "Working Class Stories" or "Gay and Lesbian Stories." The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene.
Book Synopsis Approaches to Teaching Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works by : John Wharton Lowe
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works written by John Wharton Lowe and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells the story of a woman, a community, and the African American experience from the Civil War through Jim Crow to the civil rights movement. This narrative and Gaines's other novels and short stories explore the life of blacks in the South, their religious traditions and folkways, and their struggles under oppression. The southern communities described are diverse: blacks, creoles of color, poor whites, and wealthy landowners. Part 1 of this volume provides biographical information about Ernest Gaines and a discussion of critical and background studies of his narrative. The essays in part 2 will help teachers of African American literature, American literature, and southern literature convey to their students various aspects of Gaines's work and the adaptations of it in relation to southern literature, history, music, folk culture, and vernaculars of English.
Book Synopsis Saints, Sinners, Saviors by : T. Harris
Download or read book Saints, Sinners, Saviors written by T. Harris and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature posits strength as a frequently contradictory and damaging trait for black women characters in several literary works of the twentieth century. Authors of these works draw upon popular images of African American women in producing what they believe to be safe literary representations. Instead, strength becomes a problematic trait, at times a disease, in many characters in which it appears. It has a detrimental impact on the relatives and neighbors of such women as well as on the women themselves. The pattern of portraying women characters as strong in African American literature has become so pronounced that it has stifled the literature.
Book Synopsis A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English by : Erin Fallon
Download or read book A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English written by Erin Fallon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the short story has existed in various forms for centuries, it has particularly flourished during the last hundred years. Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English includes alphabetically-arranged entries for 50 English-language short story writers from around the world. Most of these writers have been active since 1960, and they reflect a wide range of experiences and perspectives in their works. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes biography, a review of existing criticism, a lengthier analysis of specific works, and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The volume begins with a detailed introduction to the short story genre and concludes with an annotated bibliography of major works on short story theory.
Book Synopsis The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by : Tara Powell
Download or read book The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature written by Tara Powell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never in its long history has the South provided an entirely comfortable home for the intellectual. In this thought-provoking contribution to the field of southern studies, Tara Powell considers the evolving ways that major post--World War II southern writers have portrayed intellectuals -- from Flannery O'Connor's ironic view of "interleckchuls" to Gail Godwin's southerners striving to feel at home in the academic world. Although Walker Percy, like his fellow Catholic writer O'Connor, explicitly rejected the intellectual label for himself, he nonetheless introduced the modern novel of ideas to southern letters, Powell shows, by placing sympathetic, non-caricatured intellectuals at the center of his influential works. North Carolinians Doris Betts and her student Tim McLaurin made their living teaching literature and creative writing in academia, and Betts's fiction often includes dislocated academics while McLaurin's superb memoirs, often funny, frequently point up the limitations of the mind as opposed to the heart and the spirit. Examining works by Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Randall Kenan, Powell traces the evolution of the black American literacy narrative from a stress on the post-Emancipation conviction, which saw formal education as an essential means of resisting oppression, to the growing suspicion in the post--civil rights era of literacy acts that may estrange educated blacks from the larger black community. Powell concludes with Godwin, who embraces university life in her fiction as she explores what it means to be a southern female intellectual in the modern world -- a world in which all those markers inscribe isolation.
Book Synopsis The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction by : Darryl Dickson-Carr
Download or read book The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction written by Darryl Dickson-Carr and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In both the literal and metaphorical senses, it seemed as if 1970s America was running out of gas. The decade not only witnessed long lines at gas stations but a citizenry that had grown weary and disillusioned. High unemployment, runaway inflation, and the energy crisis, caused in part by U.S. dependence on Arab oil, characterized an increasingly bleak economic situation. As Edward D. Berkowitz demonstrates, the end of the postwar economic boom, Watergate, and defeat in Vietnam led to an unraveling of the national consensus. During the decade, ideas about the United States, how it should be governed, and how its economy should be managed changed dramatically. Berkowitz argues that the postwar faith in sweeping social programs and a global U.S. mission was replaced by a more skeptical attitude about government's ability to positively affect society. From Woody Allen to Watergate, from the decline of the steel industry to the rise of Bill Gates, and from Saturday Night Fever to the Sunday morning fervor of evangelical preachers, Berkowitz captures the history, tone, and spirit of the seventies. He explores the decade's major political events and movements, including the rise and fall of détente, congressional reform, changes in healthcare policies, and the hostage crisis in Iran. The seventies also gave birth to several social movements and the "rights revolution," in which women, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities all successfully fought for greater legal and social recognition. At the same time, reaction to these social movements as well as the issue of abortion introduced a new facet into American political life-the rise of powerful, politically conservative religious organizations and activists. Berkowitz also considers important shifts in American popular culture, recounting the creative renaissance in American film as well as the birth of the Hollywood blockbuster. He discusses how television programs such as All in the Family and Charlie's Angels offered Americans both a reflection of and an escape from the problems gripping the country.
