Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877-1915, and: Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin, and: The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (review)

1989 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-771
Author(s):  
Keith Byerman
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Black American

Baldwin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
James Baldwin ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Black American ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
American Writer

The black American writer James Baldwin famously broke with his youthful formation as a preacher, transferring his creative energies from the pulpit to the pen. The chapter argues that Baldwin’s literary endeavors can be read as black theological reflection—not in the sense that they employ theological images and tropes but in the deeper sense that they engage with theological ideas. Specifically, the chapter argues that Baldwin puts forward a black negative theology: He argues that black theology goes wrong when it tries to make positive claims about God, it goes right when it reflects on God’s continuing influence despite our inability to name God accurately. In other words, Baldwin presents a way of doing black theology in a context of secularism, where religion is managed or excluded. The chapter further argues, however, that Baldwin himself falls prey to the dangers of secularism when he prescribes love to solve the theological problem he diagnoses without sufficient attention to judgment.

The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism

1987 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce A. Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Black American

Some Thoughts on the Mutual Displacements/Appropriations/Accommodations of Culture in Several Fictions by Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Emily Miller Budick
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
History Of ◽  
Entire History

InPlaying in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.

Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877-1915.

1990 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Frances Smith Foster ◽  
Dickson D. Bruce
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Black American

scholarly journals Trends in James Baldwin Criticism 2001–10

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-196
Author(s):  
Lynn Orilla Scott
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Numerous Book ◽  
Four Books ◽  
New Material ◽  
Black Queer

James Baldwin criticism from 2001 through 2010 is marked by an increased appreciation for Baldwin’s entire oeuvre including his writing after the mid 1960s. The question of his artistic decline remains debated, but more scholars find a greater consistency and power in Baldwin’s later work than previous scholars had found. A group of dedicated Baldwin scholars emerged during this period and have continued to host regular international conferences. The application of new and diverse critical lenses—including cultural studies, political theory, religious studies, and black queer theory—contributed to more complex readings of Baldwin’s texts. Historical and legal approaches re-assessed Baldwin’s relationship to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and new material emerged on Baldwin’s decade in Turkey. Some historical perspective gave many critics a more nuanced approach to the old “art” vs. “politics” debate as it surfaced in Baldwin’s initial reception, many now finding Baldwin’s “angry” work to be more “relevant” than “out of touch” as it was thought of during his lifetime. In the first decade of the new millennium, three books of new primary source material, a new biography, four books of literary criticism, three edited collections of critical essays, two special issues of journals and numerous book chapters and articles were published, marking a significant increase not only in the quantity, but the quality of Baldwin criticism.

The Western Literary Tradition and the Qur’an

2020 ◽  
pp. 591-604
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Einboden
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Dante Alighieri ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
The West ◽  
Contemporary American Fiction ◽  
Holy Writ

From medieval European verse to contemporary American fiction, the Qur’an has consistently impacted Western literatures, influencing poets and prose writers from the middle ages to postmodernity. Sketching a chronology of the Qur’an and ‘the canon’, this chapter situates Muslim scripture as a literary precedent in Europe, Britain, and America, attending to Qur’anic echoes that emerge in diverse works penned by literati from Ludovico Ariosto to Washington Irving, from Dante Alighieri to Don DeLillo. Identifying not only oppositions, but unexpected overlaps, between Islam’s holy writ and Western artistry, this chapter suggests the topical subjects and stylistic techniques which ensure the Qur’an’s enduring significance for both literary creativity and literary criticism in the West.

Empty Houses

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kurnick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Private Individual

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 232-237
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Normal Science ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
The Third ◽  
Important Message ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Let’s take a step back. In the introduction, I sought to demonstrate some of the ways in which formalism has become instinctive in literary criticism, using several different genealogies. The first briefly surveyed some current thinkers, including Franco Moretti, Caroline Levine, Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, who assert that formalism is constitutive of literary study and a distillation of the best elements of its scholarly history. The second looked at how formalism had emerged as a contrast to methods based on reading for the content and ideas of literary texts, considering first a trajectory up to the New Criticism and Cleanth Brooks’s diagnosis of the heresy of paraphrase and subsequently an arc away from it, one through Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida that maintained the suspicion of literary content. And the third looked at the scholarship that formed the ‘ethical turn’, which similarly refused to read for the moral thought in literature, preferring to emphasise the ethical effects of form. All the while, though, there has been a sort of normal science of literary criticism that largely refused the insistence on form and was willing to let its scholarship rest with attempts to bring authors into conversation with issues that the critics cared about. That school of criticism has never received the dignity of a formal title, and I concluded by suggesting that it deserved one. Moreover, I argued, the moral thought in Victorian narratives offered a useful example in this regard, since it is a literary tradition deeply concerned with communicating an important message, and subsequent traditions in moral philosophy offer useful resources for clarifying the ideas such authors had....

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document