beee1234 's review for:

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

5.0

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Brilliant and you should seriously read it. I read it as I was working on an essay on Sylvia Plath and race - as critics love to deny Plath's racist culpability. Morrison, in her criticism of White writing as a whole, lays bear the plots, again and again, of Plath's poems involving Whiteness, Blackness, and "the Other" (term used by Plath critics). Key example is Plath's "Ariel" poem, a poem on which I could find not one single piece of racial analysis. If you aim to be a critical, intelligent consumer of White literature to any degree, I cannot encourage reading this work enough. Morrison is one of the greatest literary minds of our time, this being but one testament.