Signs and cities : Black literary postmodernism / Madhu Dubey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dubey, Madhu.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Postmodernism (Literature)--United States.

Postmodernism (Literature).

African Americans--Intellectual life.

African Americans.

City and town life in literature.

African Americans in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (295 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970's, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression.

Contents:

The postmodern moment in Black literary and cultural studies

Books of life: postmodern uses of print literacy

Urban writing as voyeurism: literature in the age of spectacle

Reading as listening: the Southern folk aesthetic

Reading as mediation: urbanity in the age of information.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-276) and index.

ISBN:

9786611125509

9781281125507

1281125504

9780226167282

0226167283

OCLC:

476229154