Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey, whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system of interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the 'Talking Book', a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. The second volume in an enterprising trilogy on African-American literature, The Signifying Monkey--which expands the arguments of Figures in Black--makes an important contribution to literary theory, African-American literature, folklore, and literary history.
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.
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New Preface ; Introduction ; Part I ; 1. A Myth of Origins:Esu Elegbara and the Signifying Mokey ; 2. The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning ; 3. Figures of Significance ; Part II ; 4. The Trope of the Talking Book ; 5. Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text ; 6. On "The Blackness of Blackness": Ishmael Reed and a Critique of the Sign ; 7. Color Me Zora: Alice Walker's (Re) Writing of the Speakerly Text ; New Afterward ; Notes ; Index
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Eclectic, exciting, convincing, provocative, challenging ... Gates gives black literature room to breathe, invents interpretive frameworks that enable us to experience black writing rather than label it in terms of theme or ideology. From this perspective his book is a generous, long-awaited gift ... Like great novels that force us to view the world differently, Mr. Gates' compelling study suggests new ways of seeing.
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"Twenty-five years after its early exploration of the 'African-to-African/American' structure of textual meanings -- literary and oral -- Gates' seminal work re-emerges, revised and updated. Throughout that often turbulent quarter-century of African American intellectual discourse, some texts have retained a steadfast relevance. The Signifying Monkey continues to 'signify.'"--Wole Soyinka "The Signifying Monkey is a trailblazing act of the critical imagination; a bold and brilliant reshaping of the African American literary and cultural tradition that has redrawn the map of American studies. I turn to this book for its deft interpretations, its rare insights, and its defining wisdom that defies the passage of time. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s most important work gives us a resonant framework of human values to guide our literary explorations and illuminate our cultural engagements."--Homi Bhabha, author of The Location of Culture "Twenty-five years on from its first, explosive appearance, this wonderful book is still enlightening, stimulating, and enriching. It remains an indispensable point of orientation for the study of African American literature and the broader ecology of modern cultures that nurtured it."--Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic Praise for the previous edition: "Eclectic, exciting, convincing, provocative, challenging.... Gates gives black literature room to breathe, invents interpretive frameworks that enable us to experience black writing rather than label it in terms of theme or ideology. From this perspective his book is a generous, long-awaited gift.... Like great novels that force us to view the world differently, Mr. Gates' compelling study suggests new ways of seeing."--John Wideman, The New York Times Book Review "Brilliantly original. Besides the work of Houston Baker, I cannot think of a more exciting reassessment of black literature that has been published in many years. The Signifying Monkey has the feel of a seminal work, likely to reshape the course of black American literary criticism for years."--The Washington Post Book World "One of the most significant events in the development of Afro-American studies. Bold, ambitious, original.... An important contribution, not only to the study of Afro-American literature, but to the whole enterprise of 'literary theory' as it applies to any literature whatsoever. This is a brilliant book, and it deserves to be read widely." --Critical Inquiry "The singularity of this book and the pleasure it gives are due to the very fruitful conjunction it manages to achieve.... It is rarely the case that work on a marginalized corpus makes such a contribution simultaneously to linguistics, rhetoric, and literary theory."--Jacques Derrida
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Selling point: 25th anniversary edition of Gates's landmark work of cultural studies
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, as well as director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American and Africana Studies, and is co-editor, with K. Anthony Appiah, of Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. With Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, he is the co-editor of the eight-volume biographical encyclopedia African American National Biography. In addition, he is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars, Colored People: A Memoir, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (co-authored with Cornell West). His four-hour documentary, Black in Latin America, aired on PBS in April and May.
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Selling point: 25th anniversary edition of Gates's landmark work of cultural studies

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780195136470
Publisert
2014
Utgiver
Vendor
Oxford University Press Inc
Vekt
544 gr
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
157 mm
Dybde
23 mm
Aldersnivå
UF, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
352

Forfatter

Biographical note

Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Havard University; Editor-in-Chief, Oxford American Studies Center. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 'Skip' is one of the most powerful academic voices in America. In 1997 Gates was voted one of Time Magazine's '25 Most influential Americans'. He is most recognised for his extensive research of African American history and literature, and for developing and expanding the African American Studies program at Harvard University. The first black to have received a Ph.D. from Cambridge, Gates is the author of many books, articles, essays and reviews, and has received numerous awards and honorary degrees. Gates who has displayed an endless dedication to bringing African- American culture into the public, has co-authored, co-edited and produced some of the most comprehensive African-American reference materials in the country.