scholarly journals Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and United States book clubs

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Madigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Book Club ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The United States ◽  
Book Clubs ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Oprah's Book Club ◽  
American Authors

This essay focuses on the influence of commercial book clubs in the United States. It will examine the country's oldest commercial book club, the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC), Oprah's Book Club (OBC), which bears the name of its founder, television personality Oprah Winfrey, and their roles in the careers of two African-American authors, Richard Wright and Toni Morrison.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

Reading identity: American and Irish Women’s book clubs, culture, and identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-152
Author(s):  
Christy Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Book Club ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The United States ◽  
Book Clubs ◽  
High Status ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reading Identity ◽  
Capital Development

This research examines the role of reading and book club attendance in the lives of Irish and American women’s fiction readers who actively participate in women’s book clubs utilizing mixed methodology, including ethnographic observation, participation in book club meetings, and in-depth narrative interviews. Women in Ireland and the United States used reading to develop a sense of self and to learn about the social world, as well as to construct their own identities, often in contrast to expected norms of feminine identity. Women in Ireland utilized reading and book clubs to develop knowledge and understanding; women in the United States were influenced to increase their status in order to potentially secure or retain a high-status romantic partner. At the same time, important key themes relating to social positionality and social networks, capital development, and the construction of identity were similar and central to women in both cultural environments. Reading was deeply entrenched in the identities of the women in this study and attending book clubs allowed them to continue engaging literature, construct identities, and gain knowledge about the world around them.

scholarly journals The Land without the Canon Wars: Language, Literature, and New Freedoms in Myanmar

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1535-1539
Author(s):  
Amy K. Levin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Public University ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Language Literature

Landing in Yangon (Formerly Rangoon) in February 2013, Less Than Three Months After President Barack Obama's Historic trip to Myanmar (Burma), I wondered what I would encounter. Serving as the first Fulbright specialist at a Myanmar public university in thirty years forced me to alter my approach to teaching the literature of the United States that appeared during the time Myanmar isolated itself. It also compelled me to reconsider the relations among literature, human rights, and language. Locals who taught literature of the United States and Britain never experienced the “culture wars” of the 1980s and the expansion of the literary canon. Keats was on the syllabus in every undergraduate English course, while African American authors were absent, and some of my students were surprised that Americans no longer enslave Africans.

Sentimental Frauds

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (01) ◽  
pp. 83-113
Author(s):  
Simon Stern
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Book Club ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
Oprah's Book Club ◽  
Ongoing Concern ◽  
Literary Fraud

The 2006 class action against James Frey, concerning his fabrications in A Million Little Pieces, was the first suit of its kind in the United States. There is nothing new about false memoirs, so what can explain the lawsuit? When the book was promoted on “Oprah's Book Club,” viewers were invited to respond emotionally, and saw their responses as a form of testimony. Those responses produced a sense of betrayal and inauthenticity when Frey's falsehoods were revealed. This view finds support in the eighteenth‐century sentimental novel, which similarly linked readers' reactions to the author's emotional authenticity. Fraud was an ongoing concern for sentimental novelists, some of whom used elaborate editorial to ploys to disavow responsibility for the text, while others populated their novels with fraudulent characters, intended as foils for the protagonist. An investigation of these novels helps to reveal the implications of the Frey case for future claims of literary fraud.

scholarly journals Anti-Racist Pedagogy in the Canonization of Toni Morrison

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
Min Pun
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Interdisciplinary Studies ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
American Schools

The paper aims to examine the anti-racist approach in pedagogy in relation to the issues of representations of African Americans in American schools, curricula, and literary canon. It has considered anti-racist pedagogy as a correct approach to creating a truly democratic society in a racist society like the United States of America. In order to address these issues, Toni Morrison has been considered the most successful African American writer who has attained canonical status within the mainstream of both African American and American literature. The paper has, thus, raised some of the vital issues related to the representations of African Americans in American schools, curricula, and the literary canons.Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 5(2) 2017: 15-24

Richard Wright

2018 ◽  
pp. 263-286
Author(s):  
James B. Haile
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Nature Writing ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Growing Body

Richard Wright is an African American writer traditionally read within the American (and Western) literary realist framework. There is, though, a growing body of scholarship around his later haiku nature writing. Within this scholarship, scholars have theorized the ways in which his political thinking influenced his adaptation of the Japanese haiku form. Little of the scholarship, traditional or burgeoning, has focused on the ways in which the “nature thinking” present in his later haiku was already present throughout his early, middle, and late writing. But, what is more, little of the scholarship focuses on the ways in which his nature thinking was formative to the development of his “literary realism.” This chapter by James B. Haile III not only demonstrates the linkage between “nature thinking” and politics in his prose but also argues that Wright himself both participated in and was formative to the development of black nature writing in the United States.

Literary celebrities as counterpublics: A comparative study of Gao Xingjian and Toni Morrison

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ka-chi Cheuk
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Book Club ◽  
African American Female ◽  
Nobel Lecture ◽  
Central European ◽  
Gao Xingjian ◽  
Oprah's Book Club ◽  
Domain I

Despite its universal importance, the Nobel Prize in literature, which is based in Sweden and administered by the Swedish Academy, is a central European literary prize. And the prestige which the Nobel Prize bestows upon its winners is fuelled by a central-European type of fetishization of intellectual achievement, in which Nobel laureates are more known than they are read. Rather than being publicly recognized for their literary achievements, Nobel Prize-winning authors become literary celebrities who represent various kinds of Nobel-related capitals, including political capital, cultural capital and economic capital. In this article, I investigate on two non-European, Nobel Prize-winning authors, Gao Xingjian (the first Chinese-language Nobel author, 2000) and Toni Morrison (the first African American female Nobel author, 1993), and how they represent different conceptions of literary celebrities, and by extension different types of counterpublics. In order to study the relationship between Nobel literary laureates, storytelling and the representation of marginalized groups in the public domain, I examine and compare how Gao Xingjian’s and Toni Morrison’s Nobel lectures give voice to the Sinophone community and the African American community respectively. For Gao’s case, I study his Nobel lecture against the backdrop of the Chinese ‘Nobel complex’. In Morrison’s case, I examine her Nobel lecture as being re-presented in her appearances on Oprah’s Book Club, a reading initiative launched by the popular American television talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Rediscovering Frank Yerby

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
African American ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
The Social ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Social Protest Novels

During his career, Frank Yerby wrote 33 novels, numerous short stories, and poetry, making him one of the most prolific and financially successful African American authors of all time. However, while some critics such as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps initially praised Yerby, many began to become frustrated with his lack of overt engagement with segregation and racial oppression in his work and personal statements. Infamously, Robert Bone called Yerby “the prince of the pulpsters” in his 1958 The Negro Novel in America. Reconsidering Frank Yerby positions Yerby within the African American literary tradition and emphasizes his role, as Darwin Turner puts it, as the “debunker of myths.” Reconsidering Frank Yerby achieves these goals by highlighting Yerby’s shifting perceptions regarding his role as a writer throughout his career and through an examination of his work in relation to the social protest novels and literature of writers such as Richard Wright, the reactions of his readers, his exploration of religion and existentialism, his deconstruction of race, his transnational focus, and other topics.

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