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As an anthropology student studying with Franz Boas, Zora Neale Hurston recorded African American folklore in rural central Florida, studied hoodoo in New Orleans and voodoo in Haiti, talked with the last ex-slave to survive the Middle Passage, and collected music from Jamaica. Her ethnographic work would serve as the basis for her novels and other writings in which she shaped a vision of African American Southern rural folk culture articulated through an antiracist concept of culture championed by Boas: culture as plural, relative, and long-lived. Meanwhile, a very different antiracist model of culture learned from Robert Park's sociology allowed Richard Wright to imagine African American culture in terms of severed traditions, marginal consciousness, and generation gaps. In A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism, Christopher Douglas uncovers the largely unacknowledged role played by ideas from sociology and anthropology in nourishing the politics and forms of minority writers from diverse backgrounds. Douglas divides the history of multicultural writing in the United States into three periods. The first, which spans the 1920s and 1930s, features minority writers such as Hurston and D'Arcy McNickle, who were indebted to the work of Boas and his attempts to detach culture from race. The second period, from 1940 to the mid-1960s, was a time of assimilation and integration, as seen in the work of authors such as Richard Wright, Jade Snow Wong, John Okada, and Ralph Ellison, who were influenced by currents in sociological thought. The third period focuses on the writers we associate with contemporary literary multiculturalism, including Toni Morrison, N. Scott Momaday, Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Douglas shows that these more recent writers advocated a literary nationalism that was based on a modified Boasian anthropology and that laid the pluralist grounds for our current conception of literary multiculturalism. Ultimately, Douglas's "unified field theory" of multicultural literature brings together divergent African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Native American literary traditions into one story: of how we moved from thinking about groups as races to thinking about groups as cultures—and then back again.
Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Multiculturalism in which ethnic literary modernists of the 1930s play a crucial role. Focusing on the remarkable careers of four ethnic fiction writers of the 1930s (Younghill Kang, D'Arcy McNickle, Zora Neale Hurston, and Américo Paredes) Sorensen presents a new view of the history of multicultural literature in the U.S. The first part of the book situates these authors within the modernist era to provide an alternative, multicultural vision of American modernism. The second part examines the complex reception histories of these authors' works, showing how they have been claimed or rejected as ancestors for contemporary multiethnic writing. Combining the approaches of the new modernist studies and ethnic studies, the book.
Examines the works of key Jewish American authors to explore how the concept of identity is put to work by identity-based literary study.
The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right’s strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism —leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 examines the literary developments of the twentieth-century's gaudiest decade. For a quarter century, filmmakers, musicians, and historians have returned to the era to explore the legacy of Watergate, stagflation, and Saturday Night Fever, uncovering the unique confluence of political and economic phenomena that make the period such a baffling time. Literary historians have never shown much interest in the era, however - a remarkable omission considering writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilyn French, Adrienne Rich, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, and Octavia E. Butler were active. Over the course of twenty-one essays, contributors explore a range of controversial themes these writers tackled, from 1960s' nostalgia to feminism and the redefinition of masculinity to sexual liberation and rock 'n' roll. Other essays address New Journalism, the rise of blockbuster culture, memoir and self-help, and crime fiction - all demonstrating that the Me Decade was nothing short of mesmerizing.
This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.
The concept of textuality in recent decades has come to designate a fundamentally contested terrain within a number of academic disciplines. How it came to occupy this position is the subject of John Mowitt's book, a critical genealogy of the social and intellectual conditions that contributed to the emergence of the textual object. Beginning with theTel Quelgroup in France in the sixties and seventies, Mowitt's study details how a certain interdisciplinary crisis prompted academics to rethink the conditions of cultural interpretation. Concentrating on three disciplinary projects—literary analysis, film studies, and musicology—Mowitt shows how textuality's emergence called into question not merely the relations among these disciplines, but also the cultural logic of disciplinary reason as such. At once an effort to define "the text" and to explore and extend the theory of textuality, this book illustrates why the notion of interdisciplinary research has recently acquired such urgency. At the same time, by emphasizing the genealogical dimension of the textual object, Mowitt raises the issues of its "antidisciplinary" character, and by extension its immediate pertinence for the current debates over multiculturalism and Eurocentrism. Innovative, historically astute and theoretically informed, this important book will be indispensable reading for all scholars in literary and cultural studies.
Table of contents
This comprehensive guide to the history of literary criticism from antiquity to the present day provides an authoritative overview of the major movements, figures, and texts of literary criticism, as well as surveying their cultural, historical, and philosophical contexts. Supplies the cultural, historical and philosophical background to the literary criticism of each era Enables students to see the development of literary criticism in context Organised chronologically, from classical literary criticism through to deconstruction Considers a wide range of thinkers and events from the French Revolution to Freud’s views on civilization Can be used alongside any anthology of literary criticism or as a coherent stand-alone introduction
The book explores the discursive and theoretical conditions for conceptualizing the postethnic literary. It historicizes US multicultural and postcolonial studies as institutionalized discursive formations, which constitute a paratext that regulates the reception of literary texts according to the paradigm of representativeness. Rather than following that paradigm, the study offers an alternative framework by rereading contemporary literary texts for their investment in literary form. By means of self-reflective intermedial transpositions, the writings of Sherman Alexie, Chang-rae Lee, and Jamaica Kincaid insist upon a differentiation between the representation of cultural sign systems or subject positions and the dramatization of individual gestures of authorship. As such, they form a postethnic literary constellation, further probed in the epilogue of the study focused on Dave Eggers.