How to Read African American Literature

How to Read African American Literature
Author :
Publisher : NYU Press
Total Pages : 223
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781479838141
ISBN-13 : 1479838144
Rating : 4/5 (41 Downloads)

Book Synopsis How to Read African American Literature by : Aida Levy-Hussen

Download or read book How to Read African American Literature written by Aida Levy-Hussen and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with legacies of the slave past, Aida Levy-Hussen’s argument develops on two levels: as a textual analysis of black historical fiction, and as a critical examination of the reading practices that characterize the scholarship of our time. Drawing on psychoanalysis, memory studies, and feminist and queer theory, Levy-Hussen examines how works by Toni Morrison, David Bradley, Octavia Butler, Charles Johnson, and others represent and mediate social injury and collective grief. In the criticism that surrounds these novels, she identifies two major interpretive approaches: “therapeutic reading” (premised on the assurance that literary confrontations with historical trauma will enable psychic healing in the present), and “prohibitive reading” (anchored in the belief that fictions of returning to the past are dangerous and to be avoided). Levy-Hussen argues that these norms have become overly restrictive, standing in the way of a more supple method of interpretation that recognizes and attends to the indirect, unexpected, inconsistent, and opaque workings of historical fantasy and desire. Moving beyond the question of whether literature must heal or abandon historical wounds, Levy-Hussen proposes new ways to read African American literature now.


How to Read African American Literature Related Books

How to Read African American Literature
Language: en
Pages: 223
Authors: Aida Levy-Hussen
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-12-13 - Publisher: NYU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights
Reading Black Books
Language: en
Pages: 208
Authors: Claude Atcho
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-05-17 - Publisher: Baker Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Learning from Black voices means listening to more than snippets. It means attending to Black stories. Reading Black Books helps Christians hear and learn from
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Language: en
Pages: 159
Authors: Zora Neale Hurston
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 1937 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What Was African American Literature?
Language: en
Pages: 193
Authors: Kenneth W. Warren
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-05-03 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literature—and to change th
Ulysses in Black
Language: en
Pages: 268
Authors: Patrice D. Rankine
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2008-12-30 - Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this groundbreaking work, Patrice D. Rankine asserts that the classics need not be a mark of Eurocentrism, as they have long been considered. Instead, the cl