Maus’s book _Understanding Colson Whitehead_ constitutes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Whitehead. (NOTE: What is appended here is the table of contents, an excerpt from Chapter One that lays out the critical apparatus of the book, and the bibliography for the volume) - Reviews: "Derek C. Whitehead is hardly the first to attempt to fill gaps in African-American history, but his playful juxtaposition of rhetorical templates opens up spaces where readers can engage with both the vernacular tradition and new media, adding their own verses to the legend of John Henry in an environment of randomness in which bits of myth are shuffled, rearranged, recycled to meet the needs of communities trying to make sense of suffering.This is the first book-length analysis of Whitehead's body of work, from _The Intuitionist_ through _Zone One_ (alas, it went to press before _The Noble Hustle_ was released.to say nothing of _The Underground Railroad_). Throughout the novel, Whitehead employs the conventions of a variety of modes of representation (such as the folk song, the academic history, and the celebrity news conference) in order to communicate a variety of scenes of suffering (including forced labour, racial discrimination, and public violence), revealing the limitations of each of these methods and suggesting that scenes of suffering cannot be stuffed into conventional rhetorical templates without creating gaps and absences. When a public massacre interrupts the gathering, a journalist attempts to translate the scene of suffering into a conventional form, but despite the journalist’s certainty that her template can contain the suffering, her story is inaccurate and incomplete. In Colson Whitehead’s 2001 novel John Henry Days, writers gather to find new ways to represent a nineteenth-century story of suffering for twenty-first-century readers.
0 kommentar(er)
