A home elsewhere : reading African American classics in the age of Obama

Resource Information

The work A home elsewhere : reading African American classics in the age of Obama represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Cedar Rapids Public Library-Metro Library Network. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

A home elsewhere : reading African American classics in the age of Obama

Title remainder

reading African American classics in the age of Obama

Statement of responsibility

Robert B. Stepto

Creator

• Stepto, Robert B

Subject

• African Americans in literature
• American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• American literature -- African American authors | History and criticism
• Identity (Psychology) in literature
• African Americans -- Intellectual life

Language

eng

Summary

"No single work was more important in the revolution in close reading that electrified African American literary studies in the nineteen eighties than was Robert Burns Stepto's From Behind the Veil, a work as deeply insightful as it was engagingly written. Stepto reminded us, after Keats, that one dives into the lake not merely or necessarily to swim to the other side, but to enjoy the dive. Let us hope, at the end of another era of reductive thematic (race, class, gender) criticism, that this marvelous book can once again play that salutary role in redirecting readers to the sheer splendors of close reading, reminding us of the pleasures of luxuriating in the language of African American texts." "Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University" "In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama's Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass's Narrative to W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon." "Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home else-where; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature." "Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass's correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy's novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer's understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto's account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass's and Obama's experiences."--BOOK JACKET

Member of

• W.E.B. Du Bois lectures

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

810.9/896073

Index

index present

LC call number

PS153.N5

LC item number

S75 2010

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

The W.E.B. Du Bois lectures