The Art and Life of Clarence Major

The Art and Life of Clarence Major PDF Author: Keith E. Byerman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780820349824
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Clarence Major is an award-winning painter, fiction writer, and poet-as well as an essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and memoirist. He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. The author traces Major's life and career from his complex family history in Georgia through his encounters with important literary and artistic figures in Chicago and New York to his present status as a respected writer, artist, teacher, and scholar living in California.

The Art and Life of Clarence Major

The Art and Life of Clarence Major PDF Author: Keith E. Byerman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820343668
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Clarence Major is an award-winning painter, fiction writer, and poet—as well as an essayist, editor, anthologist, lexicographer, and memoirist. He has been part of twenty-eight group exhibitions, has had fifteen one-man shows, and has published fourteen collections of poetry and nine works of fiction. The Art and Life of Clarence Major is the first critical biography of this innovative African American writer and visual artist. Given the full cooperation of his subject, Keith E. Byerman traces Major’s life and career from his complex family history in Georgia through his encounters with important literary and artistic figures in Chicago and New York to his present status as a respected writer, artist, teacher, and scholar living in California. In his introduction, Byerman asks, “How does a black man who does not take race as his principal identity, an artist who deliberately defies mainstream rules, a social and cultural critic who wants to be admired by the world he attacks, and a creator who refuses to commit to one expressive form make his way in the world?” Tasking himself with opening up the multiple layers of problems and solutions in both the work and the life to consider the successes and the failures, Byerman reveals Major as one who has devoted himself to a life of experimental art that has challenged both literary and painterly practice and the conventional understanding of the nature of African American art. Major’s refusal to follow the rules has challenged readers and critics, but through it all, he has continued to produce quality work as a painter, poet, and novelist. His is the life of someone totally devoted to his creative work, one who has put his artistic vision ahead of fame, wealth, and sometimes even family. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

The Paintings and Drawings of Clarence Major

The Paintings and Drawings of Clarence Major PDF Author: Clarence Major
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 149682069X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
In the first volume to collect the paintings and drawings of Clarence Major, readers are offered six decades of unique, colorful, and compelling canvases and works on paper—works of singular beauty and social relevance. These works represent Major’s personal painterly journey of passionate commitment to art. This generous selection of more than 150 paintings and drawings shows us the melding of rich ideas and fertile images, the braiding of imagination and motif. With their pleasing arrangement of elements, the works come vividly to life. Major often juxtaposes a decorative scheme with his own unique choice of color combinations, reinforced with rigorous brushstrokes that release chromatic energy. The paintings complement and challenge the great traditions of Realism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Major is primarily a figurative and landscape painter. Here we find landscapes of singular vitality, rich in color and design, dramatic landscapes, and cityscapes representing, among other things, Major’s extensive travels in America and Europe. We are also treated to Major’s signature figurative work. In these paintings, he ventures fearlessly into familiar yet unexpected areas of richness. Also included is an introductory essay, “The Education of a Painter,” written by the artist, which further sheds light on and helps to lay a biographical, social, and historical foundation for this essential volume, reflecting a lifetime of serious commitment to painting at its best.

Dirty Bird Blues

Dirty Bird Blues PDF Author: Clarence Major
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525508090
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Dirty Bird Blues The PRH Audio book of Dirty Bird Blues by Clarence Major won a 2022 EARPHONE AWARD. Narrated by Dion Graham. A Penguin Classic Set in post-World War II Chicago and Omaha, the novel features Manfred Banks, a young, harmonica-blowing blues singer who is always writing music in his head. Torn between his friendships with fellow musicians and nightclub life and his responsibilities to his wife and child, along with the pressures of dealing with a racist America that assaults him at every turn, Manfred seeks easy answers in "Dirty Bird" (Old Crow whiskey) and in moving on. He moves to Omaha with hopes of better opportunities as a blue-collar worker, but the blues in his soul and the dreams in his mind keep bringing him back to face himself. After a nightmarish descent into his own depths, Manfred emerges with fresh awareness and possibility. Through Manfred, we witness and experience the process by which modern American English has been vitalized and strengthened by the poetry and the poignancy of the African-American experience. As Manfred struggles with the oppressive constraints of society and his private turmoil, his rich inner voice resonates with the blues.

My Amputations

My Amputations PDF Author: Clarence Major
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 1573661430
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This novel is about a man pursued by his shadow. Its protagonist is either a desperate ex-con who has become convinced that he is an important American novelist or a desperate American novelist who has become convinced that he, and most of what passes for literary life on three continents, is a con.

All-night Visitors

All-night Visitors PDF Author: Clarence Major
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555533670
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
"All-Night Visitors is devoted to lush description. Mr. Major is unquestionably a sincere and passionate writer." -- New York Times

Seizing the Word

Seizing the Word PDF Author: Keith E. Byerman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Seizing the Word offers a comprehensive reading of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), a pivotal figure in the intellectual life of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. As a historian, journalist, novelist, poet, and social and literary critic, this extraordinary man profoundly influenced our understanding of the African American experience. Following his initial discussion of Du Bois's earliest writing, Keith E. Byerman posits The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as a master text that established the tropes of doubleconsciousness and the veil for which Du Bois is known, and incorporated the various genres through which he voiced his understanding of the world. The remainder of the study discusses Du Bois's works as elaborations of the master text within and against the contemporary discourses on history, art, and self. Throughout Byerman examines the connections between the personal and intellectual aspects of Du Bois's life to reveal the intense engagement with moral and ideological issues found even in texts that Du Bois represented as “objective.” At the same time, in order to present some of the complexity and conflict that runs through Du Bois's work, Byerman identifies the tensions and patterns in Du Bois's writing that cross disciplines or genres. Instead of focusing on one aspect of Du Bois's career, Seizing the Word attempts a more synthetic approach, primarily by examining Du Bois in terms of contemporary literary and cultural theory, most notably Lacan's Law of the Father and Erikson's work on identity.

Fingering the Jagged Grain

Fingering the Jagged Grain PDF Author: Keith E. Byerman
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337765
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In Fingering the Jagged Grain, Keith E. Byerman discusses how black writers such as Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines have moved away from the ideological rigidity of the black arts movement that arose in the 1960s to create a more expressive, imaginative, and artistic fiction inspired by the example of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Combining a strong concern for technique and craftsmanship with elements of African American heritage including jazz, blues, spirituals, cautionary tales, and voodoo, these writers have created a vital fiction that celebrates the strength and resilience of the black American voice as it recounts the painful details and brutal episodes of black experience.

Critical Shift

Critical Shift PDF Author: Karen L. Georgi
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271062479
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
American Civil War–era art critics James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William J. Stillman classified styles and defined art in terms that have become fundamental to our modern periodization of the art of the nineteenth century. In Critical Shift, Karen Georgi rereads many of their well-known texts, finding certain key discrepancies between their words and our historiography that point to unrecognized narrative desires. The book also studies ruptures and revolutionary breaks between “old” and “new” art, as well as the issue of the morality of “true” art. Georgi asserts that these concepts and their sometimes loaded expression were part of larger rhetorical structures that gainsay the uses to which the key terms have been put in modern historiography. It has been more than fifty years since a book has been devoted to analyzing the careers of these three critics, and never before has their role in the historiography and periodization of American art been analyzed. The conclusions drawn from this close rereading of well-known texts challenge the fundamental nature of “historical context” in American art history.

The New Black Poetry

The New Black Poetry PDF Author: Clarence Major
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Copy 3 is to replace the 2 missing copies noted in both holdings records.

Thunderclouds in the Forecast

Thunderclouds in the Forecast PDF Author: Clarence Major
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144271
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Thunderclouds in the Forecast traverses the linked histories of two friends—one Black, the other white—who grew up wards of the state in New York. It’s April 1976 and Ray is taking Amtrak to San Francisco to reconnect with Scotty, his oldest friend, whom he met in a shelter for abandoned children. While Ray has embraced the stable tedium of steady employment, Scotty’s life has been erratic, a trail of short-lived affairs and dead-end jobs. Maybe Ray, who’s just won the lottery, is finally in a position to help him. When Ray’s train is delayed in Lorena, a Gold Rush outpost turned college town, he meets Alice. Together they embark on a romance that tempts him to stay. By the time Ray arrives in San Francisco, Scotty has abandoned his bartending job, his rented room, and his scant belongings and skipped town with a married woman from Lorena. Now Ray has more than one reason to return. A preeminent American writer who thrives on reinvention, Major returns with an unforgettable exploration of life on the brink of sweeping change. With spare prose and subtle poignancy, Thunderclouds in the Forecast probes love, loyalty, and belonging. As Toni Morrison wrote, “Clarence Major has a remarkable mind and the talent to match.”