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The traumatic experiences of persecution and genocide have changed traditional views of literature. The discussion of historical truth versus aesthetic autonomy takes an unexpected turn when confronted with the experiences of the victims of the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, the Cultural Revolution, Apartheid and other crimes against humanity. The question is whether - and, if so, to what extent - literary imagination may depart from historical truth. In general, the first reactions to traumatic historical experiences are autobiographical statements, written by witnesses of the events. However, the second and third generations, the sons and daughters of the victims as well as of the victimizers, tend to free themselves from this generic restriction and claim their own way of remembering the history of their parents and grandparents. They explore their own limits of representation, and feel free to use a variety of genres; they turn to either realist or postmodernist, ironic or grotesque modes of writing.
"By exposing the literary motifs of subversion and seduction inherent in these works as disruptive to the flow, circulation, and expansion of value, A Passion for Consumption positions American literary culture as an extension of commodity economics."--BOOK JACKET.
Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison draws on contemporary scholarship and Morrison's own commentary to explicate all of her novels published to date, including her 2008 novel A Mercy. Morrison, the 1993 Nobel Prize winner, is an unabashedly confrontational author. Her profound and complex novels address problems such as slavery, violence, poverty, and sexual abuse. Morrison's work encompasses a project of total cultural renewal: she re-imagines and reaffirms the experience of African Americans from the earliest days of slavery up to the present, avoiding stereotypes or oversimplification. She employs African and Western literary traditions and conventions as a basis for both structure and critique, re-writing some of the «master narratives» of American culture and history. This book analyzes Morrison's novels in the context of African American history and literature, and provides supplemental material to guide teachers and students to understand and appreciate Morrison's novels.
Introduction. Raising the white South -- The many faces of the South: national images of white southernness during the civil rights era, 1960-1971 -- "This world from the standpoint of a rocking chair": country-rock and the South in the countercultural imagination -- "When in doubt, kick ass": the masculine South(s) of George Wallace, Walking tall, and Deliverance -- A tale of two Souths: the Allman Brothers Band's countercultural southernness and Lynyrd Skynyrd's rebel macho -- "I respect a good southern white man": Jimmy Carter's healing southernness and the 1976 presidential campaign -- Epilogue. Playing that dead band's song -- Appendix. Southern rock in the 1970s: survey questions
Arguably Toni Morrison's best novel, Beloved addresses the powerful legacy of slavery and those whose voices have been historically silenced by it. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, Morrison's novel confronts the past in order to heal the present
“A vast, thoroughly wonderful assortment of poetry, memoirs and stories . . . that defines today’s female Italian-American experience” (Publishers Weekly). Often stereotyped as nurturing others through food, Italian-American women have often struggled against this simplistic image to express the realities of their lives. In this unique collection, over 50 Italian-American female writers speak in voices that are loud, boisterous, sweet, savvy, and often subversively funny. Drawing on personal and cultural memories rooted in experiences of food, they dissolve conventional images, replacing them with a sumptuous, communal feast of poetry, stories, and memoir. This collection also delves i...
Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction identifies a new genre of American fiction, the rape novel, that recenters narratives of sexual violence on the survivors of violence and abuse, rather than the perpetrators. The rape novel arose during the women’s liberation movement as women writers collectively challenged the traditional erasure of female subjectivity and agency found in earlier representations of sexual violence in American fiction. The rape novel not only foregrounds survivors and their stories in a textual centering that affirms their dignity and self-worth, but also develops new narratological strategies for portraying violent, disturbin...
This volume sheds light on how to construe the contemporary political vicissitudes of the Black experience and the ongoing struggle for agency, belonging, and civil rights. It offers a fresh look at familiar concepts such as activism and belonging and models innovative approaches for studying the African diasporic experience in the 21st century.
Helps readers understand how any literary tradition involves an open conversation between its texts - a web of words that stretches from the local to the transnational. This book charts 3 different intertextual practices involving writings both within and outside the South.