Browsing by Subject "Richard Wright"
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Item An angle of vision : southern cosmopolitanism 1935-1974(2011-12) Mass, Noah; Hutchison, Coleman, 1977-; Limón, José Eduardo; Lesser, Wayne; Kevorkian, Martin; Hoelscher, StevenAs they took stock of the ways that the Great Migration and America’s post-war global role were changing the South, Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray crafted narratives that articulated a particular perspective on the South. These writers dreamed of putting the regionally distinctive characteristics that they found valuable in the South into conversation with a sense of expansiveness and possibility, one that they associated with a migratory and increasingly globally-connected nation. In this project, I examine these southern cosmopolitan negotiations in Wright, McCullers, Ellison, and Murray’s southern narratives, and I argue that these writers are crucial to our understanding of the post-migration South in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Item City of myth, muscle, and Mexicans : work, race, and space in twentieth-century Chicago literature(2011-05) Herrera, Olga Lydia; Limón, José Eduardo; Perez, Domino R.; Gonzalez, John M.; Carter, Mia; Martinez, AnneChicago occupies a place in the American imagination as a city of industry and opportunity for those who are willing to hustle. Writers have in no small part contributed to the creation of this mythology; this canon includes Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, and Richard Wright. What is it about these authors that make them the classics of Chicago literature? The “essential” books of Chicago enshrine a period during which the city still held a prominent position in the national economy and culture, and embodied for Americans something of their own identity—the value of individualism, and the Protestant work ethic. Notably absent are the narratives from immigrants, particularly those of color: for a city that was a primary destination for the Great Migration of African Americans from the South and the concurrent immigration of Mexicans in the early part of the 20th century, it is remarkable that these stories have not gained significant attention, with the exception of Richard Wright’s. This dissertation interrogates the discourse of ambition and labor in the Chicago literary tradition from the perspective of three Mexican American authors from Chicago—Carlos Cortez, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros. These authors, faced with late 20th century deindustrialization and the enduring legacy of segregation, engage with the canonical narratives of Chicago by addressing the intersections of race and citizenship as they affect urban space and labor opportunities. Rather than simply offering a critique, however, the Mexican American authors engage in a re-visioning of the city that incorporates the complexities of a fluid, transnational experience, and in doing so suggest the future of urban life in a post-industrial America.Item MultipliCities : the infrastructure of African American literature, 1899-1996(2012-12) Dean, Jeremy Stuart; Barrish, PhillipMultipliCities: The Infrastructure of African American Literature, 1899-1996 explores intersections between black fiction and canonical sociology through two extended case studies focusing on the authors Richard Wright and Paul Beatty. The formation of disciplinary sociology in the early twentieth century had a profound influence on the production and reception of African American literature. Sociologists at the University of Chicago were among the first to teach black fiction and poetry in the academy, and institutionalized a social scientific framework for comprehending black culture. This framework, which assumes that black writing produces racial knowledge about black experience, continues to pressure contemporary African American authors through the demands of the publishing industry today. At the same time, though, African American authors throughout the twentieth century have resisted sociological expectations for their work and responded critically to the social scientific study of the black community more broadly. MultipliCities studies black writers whose fiction is specifically critical of sociological conceptions of black personhood and place. While Richard Wright's best-selling Native Son (1940) has been canonized as a type of sociological fiction, I read against this critical tradition for the ways in which his juvenile delinquent protagonist, Bigger Thomas, evades his production as a social scientific object. I locate further evidence for Wright's revision of sociological knowledge production in his final, posthumously published novel, A Father's Law (1960; 2008), in which the main character is a sociologist and a serial killer who violently deforms the mastery of the social scientific expert. In my second case study, I turn to contemporary novelist Paul Beatty's post-civil rights era novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), which I read as a mock ethnography in its description of a postindustrial ghetto that exceeds the sociological imagination of the so-called "culture of poverty." Though rap music is often interpreted as evidence of the alleged impoverishment of inner-city black community, in my final chapter I read Beatty's "hip hop novel" as challenging the social scientific expectations for black popular culture that are part of the ongoing legacy of the canonical sociology of race.Item Reproducibility in the age of mass feeling : toward a media history of the thirties(2019-09-24) Canfield, Kristin Louise; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Houser, Heather; Lewis, RandolphReproducibility in the Age of Mass Feeling plots a genealogy for media history that centers on the work of British and American writers in the 1930s. The project examines how these writers understood the newly reproducible character of media as essential to modern political belonging. Taking Walter Benjamin as a point of departure, this dissertation tracks how Richard Wright, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston incorporated emergent media in their own work. The project tracks competing theories of reproduction, elaborating how these writers related to the rapidly changing media environments in which they wrote and lived. Even as these writers critiqued the ways in which then-new media participated in and perpetuated a state built on racial exclusion, they were also excited about the possibility of harnessing the power of media to reform the state. As these writers incorporated elements of new media into their own works—for instance, by reproducing newspaper articles and photographs within them—they challenged narrow conceptions of authorial agency and demonstrated how one can be implicated in a system that one claims to oppose. Elevating the work of these writers to a place in media theory alongside Walter Benjamin, the project traces a literary context for connections between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America. Staging the historiographical problem of how fascism and Jim Crow relate to one another in terms of theories of reproduction, the project excavates formal resonances between Benjamin’s critique of the Nazi state and Wright and Hurston’s writings on Jim Crow. A chapter on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), an anti-fascist essay in which Woolf connects fascism abroad to British cultural politics, bridges the chapters on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston by demonstrating how Woolf understood media to be complicit in producing fascist subjects, while extending the dissertation’s media history of the 1930s to anglophone Europe.