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4.35 AVERAGE
4.35 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
For its length, this is an excellent little book. Morrison makes such good points about American literature and whiteness and everything is phrased so well. Some of the sentences in this are artistic masterpieces (unsurprisingly) and yet it is still adds up to make a precise and cutting argument. Also this has a really good proportion of general abstract ideas and specific commentary on texts. If I ever decide to read or reread any of these texts I will definitely be revisiting this. Anyone can read this, and I think everyone should.
I wish we had been assigned this in high school along with the american fiction we read like to kill a mockingbird, hemingway, poe, etc. this is essential. 5/5
Amazing. Incredibly helpful for understanding race and American literature, particularly 19th century lit. Morrison is such a masterful writer.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
This is one of those rare books that is at least 8x too short. Morrison has kicked open a door for inquiry which is provocative and needed, drawing through expansive perception and sample close analyses enough data to argue that our most fundamental myths not only about whiteness but about American-ness have been built upon an historical infrastructure of slavery. It is not nearly enough, she says, to analyze an artist's life or work for racist ideas--in fact, differing from some of our current trends in this area, she takes "no position, nor do I encourage one, on the quality of a work based on the attitudes of an author." In addition then, and more vitally, we must examine the fictional constructions of black (and thus white) identity. This is an area for scholarship which criticism heretofore has avoided, "too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes." And now this book belongs on my short shelf of critical theory to which I must always refer.
I will definitely be thinking and analyzing American lit written by white authors with a new critical lens. Great literary criticism and interesting read.
informative
I read this book for uni, and I think it's really thoughtful and insightful, but also not groundbreaking, at least for me. I think her analysis of the construction of the USA as a nation through literature, and how Africanist identity is constructed through that is super interesting, and it would be great if more work would be done in this in an Australian context.
Toni Morrison dunks on the Dead-White-Guy canon like no other. This is a really great introduction to her school of literary criticism.
informative
reflective
fast-paced
I wish I had read this in high school; would've made all those novels in English class much more interesting to analyze. Morrison, as usual, writes with clarity of purpose; I like when you can hear someone saying what is written (in this case, they were, indeed, spoken as lectures, it seems).