Can't I Love What I Criticize?

Can't I Love What I Criticize? PDF Author: Susan Neal Mayberry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Taking a close look at all the key male figures in Toni Morrison’s eight novels, this book explores Morrison’s admitted, but critically neglected, interest in the relationships between African American men and women and the “axes” on which these relationships turn. Most Morrison scholarship deals with her female characters.Can’t I Love What I Criticize?offers a response to this imbalance and to Morrison’s call for more work on men, who remain, in her words, “outside of that little community value thing.” The book also considers the barriers between black men and women thrown up by their participation in a larger, historically racist culture of competition, ownership, sexual repression, and fixed ideals about physical beauty and romantic love. Black women, Morrison says, bear their crosses “extremely well,” and black men, although they have been routinely emasculated by “white men, period,” have managed to maintain a feisty “magic” that everybody wants but nobody else has. Understanding Morrison’s treatment of her male characters, says Susan Mayberry, becomes crucial to grasping her success in “countering the damage done by a spectrum of sometimes misguided isms”--including white American feminism. Morrison’s version of masculinity suggests that black men have “successfully retained their special vitality in spite of white male resistance” and that “their connections to black women have saved their lives.” To single out her men is not to negate the preeminence of her women; rather, it is to recognize the interconnectedness and balance between them.

Can't I Love What I Criticize?

Can't I Love What I Criticize? PDF Author: Susan Neal Mayberry
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taking a close look at all the key male figures in Toni Morrison’s eight novels, this book explores Morrison’s admitted, but critically neglected, interest in the relationships between African American men and women and the “axes” on which these relationships turn. Most Morrison scholarship deals with her female characters.Can’t I Love What I Criticize?offers a response to this imbalance and to Morrison’s call for more work on men, who remain, in her words, “outside of that little community value thing.” The book also considers the barriers between black men and women thrown up by their participation in a larger, historically racist culture of competition, ownership, sexual repression, and fixed ideals about physical beauty and romantic love. Black women, Morrison says, bear their crosses “extremely well,” and black men, although they have been routinely emasculated by “white men, period,” have managed to maintain a feisty “magic” that everybody wants but nobody else has. Understanding Morrison’s treatment of her male characters, says Susan Mayberry, becomes crucial to grasping her success in “countering the damage done by a spectrum of sometimes misguided isms”--including white American feminism. Morrison’s version of masculinity suggests that black men have “successfully retained their special vitality in spite of white male resistance” and that “their connections to black women have saved their lives.” To single out her men is not to negate the preeminence of her women; rather, it is to recognize the interconnectedness and balance between them.

The Critical Life of Toni Morrison

The Critical Life of Toni Morrison PDF Author: Susan Neal Mayberry
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139346
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The first book to trace the critical reception of the great African American woman writer, attending not only to her fiction but to her nonfiction and critical writings.

Why I Hate Toni Morrison's Beloved

Why I Hate Toni Morrison's Beloved PDF Author: Scott Bradfield
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781530581764
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Essays about the pleasures and perils of loving (and hating) books, places, and other people.

Play Your Way Sane

Play Your Way Sane PDF Author: Clay Drinko
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982169230
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Stop negative thoughts, assuage anxiety, and live in the moment with these fun, easy games from improv expert Clay Drinko. If you’ve been feeling lost lately, you’re not alone! Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans were experiencing record levels of loneliness and anxiety. And in our current political turmoil, it’s safe to say that people are looking for new tools to help them feel more present, positive, and in sync with the world. So what better way to get there than play? In Play Your Way Sane, Dr. Clay Drinko offers 120 low-key, accessible activities that draw on the popular principles of improv comedy to help you tackle your everyday stress and reconnect with the people around you. Divided into twelve fun sections, including “Killing Debbie Downer” and “Thou Shalt Not Be Judgy,” the games emphasize openness, reciprocation, and active listening as the keys to a mindful and satisfying life. Whether you’re looking to improve your personal relationships, find new meaning at work, or just survive our trying times, Play Your Way Sane offers serious self-help with a side of Second City sass.

Endless Love

Endless Love PDF Author: Scott Spencer
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453205241
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The impassioned love of two teenagers leaves a path of destruction in its perilous wake Seventeen-year-old David Axelrod is consumed with his love for Jade Butterfield. So when Jade’s father exiles him from their home, David does the only thing he thinks is rational: He burns down their house. Sentenced to a psychiatric institution, David’s obsession metastasizes, and upon his release, he sets out to win the Butterfields back by any means necessary. Brilliantly written and intensely sexual, Endless Love is the deeply moving story of a first love so powerful that it becomes dangerous—not only for the young lovers, but for their families as well. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Scott Spencer, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

Recitatif

Recitatif PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593315049
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Nobel Prize winner—for the first time in a beautifully produced stand-alone edition, with an introduction by Zadie Smith “A puzzle of a story, then—a game.... When [Morrison] called Recitatif an ‘experiment’ she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.” —Zadie Smith, award-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth In this 1983 short story—the only short story Morrison ever wrote—we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Another work of genius by this masterly writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.

Our Year of Maybe

Our Year of Maybe PDF Author: Rachel Lynn Solomon
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 1481497774
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
“Emotionally resonant and deeply characterized.” —School Library Journal (starred review) From the author of You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone comes a stunning contemporary novel, perfect for fans of Five Feet Apart, that examines the complicated aftermath of unrequited love between best friends. Aspiring choreographer Sophie Orenstein would do anything for Peter Rosenthal-Porter, who’s been on the kidney transplant list as long as she’s known him. Peter, a gifted pianist, is everything to Sophie: best friend, musical collaborator, secret crush. When she learns she’s a match, donating a kidney is an easy, obvious choice. She can’t help wondering if after the transplant, he’ll love her back the way she’s always wanted. But Peter’s life post-transplant isn’t what either of them expected. Though he once had feelings for Sophie, too, he’s now drawn to Chase, the guitarist in a band that happens to be looking for a keyboardist. And while neglected parts of Sophie’s world are calling to her—dance opportunities, new friends, a sister and niece she barely knows—she longs for a now-distant Peter more than ever, growing increasingly bitter he doesn’t seem to feel the same connection. Peter fears he’ll forever be indebted to her. Sophie isn’t sure who she is without him. Then one heartbreaking night twists their relationship into something neither of them recognizes, leading them to question their past, their future, and whether their friendship is even worth fighting for.

The Four Loves

The Four Loves PDF Author: Clive Staples Lewis
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780151329168
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Analyzes the feelings and problems involved in different types of human love, including familial affection, friendship, passion, and charity.

The Program Era

The Program Era PDF Author: Mark McGurl
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674266021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
In The Program Era, Mark McGurl offers a fundamental reinterpretation of postwar American fiction, asserting that it can be properly understood only in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program. McGurl asks both how the patronage of the university has reorganized American literature and—even more important—how the increasing intimacy of writing and schooling can be brought to bear on a reading of this literature. McGurl argues that far from occasioning a decline in the quality or interest of American writing, the rise of the creative writing program has instead generated a complex and evolving constellation of aesthetic problems that have been explored with energy and at times brilliance by authors ranging from Flannery O’Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, and Toni Morrison. Through transformative readings of these and many other writers, The Program Era becomes a meditation on systematic creativity—an idea that until recently would have seemed a contradiction in terms, but which in our time has become central to cultural production both within and beyond the university. An engaging and stylishly written examination of an era we thought we knew, The Program Era will be at the center of debates about postwar literature and culture for years to come.

Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel

Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel PDF Author: Josef Benson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442237619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Issues of race, gender, women’s rights, masculinity, and sexuality continue to be debated on the national scene. These subjects have also been in the forefront of American literature, particularly in the last fifty years. One significant trend in contemporary fiction has been the failure of the heroic masculine protagonist. In Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, andJames Baldwin,Josef Benson examines key literary works of the twentieth century, notably Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), Song of Solomon (1977), and Another Country (1960). Benson argues that exaggerated masculinities originated on the American frontier and have transformed into a definition of ideal masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. Defined by violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia, these men concocted or perpetuated myths about African Americans to justify their mistreatment and mass murder of black men after Reconstruction. As Benson illustrates, the protagonists in these texts fail to perpetuate hypermasculinities, and as a result a sense of ironic heroism emerges from the narratives. Offering a unique and bold argument that connects the masculinities of cowboys and frontier figures with black males, Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel suggests alternative possibilities for American men going forward. Scholars and students of American literature and culture, African American literature and culture, and queer and gender theory will find this book illuminating and persuasive.