Toni Morrison, in a speculative essay on literary canon-making, proposes the difficult critical quest of uncovering the hidden obsession with African- Americans that has haunted the American novel throughout its history. Her principal example is to sketch a reading of Moby-Dick in which Ahab’s manic obsessiveness with the whiteness of the whale becomes a synecdoche for white America’s compulsive relation to the African-American aspects of its culture, past and present. Morrison’s reading is in the mode of D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, where what Lawrence saw as the doom of the white race is prefigured in Ahab’s compulsiveness. I am of many minds about Morrison’s critical project, if only because it would give yet another dimension to the unhappy procedure of uncovering just how much of white America cannot be exorcised from African-American fiction. [download]
Format : Ebook.Pdf
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar