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nonecompleted's review against another edition
“Narrative is not just the simple transportation of language but of ideas of the self, and ideas of the self contain negations of other people. What is it, then, to adopt or be indoctrinated into these narrative structures, those ideas, to come to know these ideas as your own, when you are the negated people?” - Dionne Brand, An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading
Something about Brand’s writing offers me a pleasant clarity. I see my clumsy attempts at articulating what I see and feel on literature presented precisely and often in gorgeous prose! This mini book is a part of the Henry Kreisel lecture series published by the University of Alberta Press, and offers a more accessible forum for critical canadian literary theory. I will not lie tho, I definitely bought this because it was by Dionne Brand lol, but reading the introductory statement piece has picked my curiosity to see what other lectures are in this series!
Something about Brand’s writing offers me a pleasant clarity. I see my clumsy attempts at articulating what I see and feel on literature presented precisely and often in gorgeous prose! This mini book is a part of the Henry Kreisel lecture series published by the University of Alberta Press, and offers a more accessible forum for critical canadian literary theory. I will not lie tho, I definitely bought this because it was by Dionne Brand lol, but reading the introductory statement piece has picked my curiosity to see what other lectures are in this series!
kikireads's review against another edition
5.0
Periodically, I doubt my personal approach to book criticism. I doubt its substance, grounding so much in the autobiographical. One is taught that the impersonal, "neutral" voice is more authoritative, more intellectually credible. Then a writer like Dionne Brand and blows all that blather away.
Starting from a childhood photograph into critiques of Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and Wide Sargasso Sea, among other texts, Brand maps herself as a reader within a colonial schema and then shows how she and other writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Wilson Harris break free of it, to varying degrees of success.
I am decades younger and too much of it was still familiar which shows how necessary these readings are even now. Thanks to Wayne State University Press who sent this to me for review at The Book Slut. I'll add the review link when it's up.
(The star rating has no meaning, in this instance. Just there to keep things looking pretty.)
Bookstagram | Twitter
Starting from a childhood photograph into critiques of Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and Wide Sargasso Sea, among other texts, Brand maps herself as a reader within a colonial schema and then shows how she and other writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Wilson Harris break free of it, to varying degrees of success.
I am decades younger and too much of it was still familiar which shows how necessary these readings are even now. Thanks to Wayne State University Press who sent this to me for review at The Book Slut. I'll add the review link when it's up.
(The star rating has no meaning, in this instance. Just there to keep things looking pretty.)
Bookstagram | Twitter
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