Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "racial" SelfFor over two centuries, critics and the black community have tended to approach African-American literature as simply one more front in the important war against racism, valuing slave narratives and twentieth-century works alike, primarily for their political impact. In this volume, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a leading scholar in African-American studies, attacks the notion of African-American literature as a kind of social realism. Insisting, instead, that critics focus on the most repressed element of African-American criticism--the language of the text--Gates advocates the use of a close, methodical analysis of language, made possible by modern literary theory. Throughout his study, Gates incorporates the theoretical insights of critics such as Bakhtin, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Bloom, as he examines the modes of representation that define black art and analyzes the unspoken assumptions made in judging this literature since its inception. Ranging from the eighteenth-century poet, Phillis Wheatley, to modern writers, Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker, Gates seeks to redefine literary criticism itself, moving away from a Eurocentric notion of a hierarchical canon--mostly white, Western, and male--to foster a truly comparative and pluralistic notion of literature. |
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African Afro-American Afro-American literature argues artistic Atonist autobiographies Bellmont Black Aesthetic Black Arts Black Arts movement black criticism black literary black literature black poetry black texts black tradition Brown called Cane century Chapter color complex contemporary critique culture curious defined dialect poetry discourse English essay Estwick explicate fiction figure formal Frado Frederick Douglass function Harlem Renaissance Harlequin Harriet human Hurston Invisible irony Ishmael Reed Jean Toomer Jes Grew Johnson language literary criticism literary theory literary tradition mask matter meaning metaphor Mumbo Jumbo mystery myth narration nature Negro notion novel Papa La Bas parody perhaps Phillis Wheatley poems poet poetic political published race racial Ralph Ellison Reed Reed's relation relationship rhetorical strategy sense Signifying Monkey slave narratives slavery social speech Sterling Brown story structure tion trope University Press voice W. E. B. Du Bois Western Wheatley's Wilson word writing written wrote York