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4.35 AVERAGE
4.35 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Rather brilliant. Much more scholarly than the Norton Lectures she gives 25 years later ("The Origin of Others"). 3 lectures into print, a total of 91 pp, the Massey Lectures from 1990. In an academic world still in the thrall of French Postmodernism, she brings some American sensibility to the floor. She urges scholars to look at American Literature in terms of "Africanism" - and not only from the POV/effect on the Black characters, but also what it has to say about the White author/characters as well. How centuries of slavery and "Black as inferior" help to define White freedom and "superiority".
Having come out of the the academic world in the late '80's, I do not totally agree with her that there was little to no interest in this, and feminist, readings of American Literature.... But that point, and urging others to join her in a rereading of Am Lit, is a worthy call to literary scholarship.
Some time is spent on Cather, Poe, Twain and Hemingway (especially Hem) to make her point.
Well worth a read - scholarly, but not dense. And not filled with a Postmodern lexicon that has you stopping to remember what certain words have come to "mean" every couple of sentences.
Having come out of the the academic world in the late '80's, I do not totally agree with her that there was little to no interest in this, and feminist, readings of American Literature.... But that point, and urging others to join her in a rereading of Am Lit, is a worthy call to literary scholarship.
Some time is spent on Cather, Poe, Twain and Hemingway (especially Hem) to make her point.
Well worth a read - scholarly, but not dense. And not filled with a Postmodern lexicon that has you stopping to remember what certain words have come to "mean" every couple of sentences.
informative
reflective
27 years later Toni Morrison’s book is more relevant than ever. The unspoken prejudice toward black Americans as well as the African continent has centuries of images that haunt the nation in a place that is difficult to reach by simple rhetoric. Morrison’s examination of these images through the nation’s literature, Poe, Cather, Hemingway, Twain – shows a symbology reinforcing prejudice and systematically making any honest reconciliation more difficult. One has to make an honest accounting of the countries origins which were not, like what our textbooks in grade school teach, a simple search for religious freedom – but a wish to flip the power structure that had excluded the colonists while maintaining the comforts that it provided, and a wish to start fresh with a clean slate while staying insulated from the wilderness. Not reckoning with these contradictions makes using the rhetoric of freedom while taking freedom from others seem reasonable at the top of the power structure. Morrison’s examination of this contradiction in our words from the very beginning shows the difficulty of seeing one's self in a fishbowl – from inside the fishbowl. It is a powerful starting point that anyone willing to make an honest assessment of our own privilege and our own blindspots needs to read.
Morrison is better at writing novels than writing lit crit, but her mind is sharp and clear and her observations, while not staggering, are worth listening to.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Referenced in the intro to How to Read Now. Glad I took a pause to read it.
In this work of literary criticism, Morrison unpacks what she calls the "Africanist presence" throughout American literature, tracing how [white, male] American authors use conflicting, contradictory structures of Blackness to reify the whiteness of their characters, themselves, and 'American' cultural identity. "Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say" (59). The literary phenomena that Morrison identifies in this work reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston's "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Parallel to Hurston's contextual sense of racialized identity, American whiteness, in the literary imagination, exists only in relation to portrayals of Blackness in American literature. Morrison's project is a call for literary critics to redirect their attention "from the racial object to the racial subject," which will only enhance our critical understanding of literature, and by extension American cultural identity.
a perennial question re: the Goodreads star system: is it about the quality of the work or how much I, personally, got out of it? (the text that appears when you hover over the stars implies the latter). I have no doubt this is a skillful and important piece of literary criticism - but hoo boy, do I not enjoy literary criticism! (it might have gone better if I were familiar with more of the works discussed in this book).
Morrison's literary analysis is (not surprisingly) fascinating and insightful. But her whole theoretical framework--how she frames the consideration of race, that is--is just brilliant.