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"Jean Toomer"
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Between the Gospel and Myth: The Biblical Critique of Persecution in \Cane,\ \Sanctuary,\ and \Beloved.\
The following two sections (\"The Blood of the Prophets\" and \"Casting the Last Stone\") will develop that perspective through a reading of Cane; that is, the point of the analysis will be to show how Cane reads culture from a biblical perspective. [...]in \"Repenting of the Violence of Our Justice,\" these critiques will find an answer in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), which concludes by presenting an alternative to the scenes of persecution to which we will now turn our attention. Crying out from the Ground \"The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound\"; with this repeated image, Jean Toomer bookends the story of \"Becky\" near the beginning of Cane.6 As I will suggest, with recourse to Girard, this image cries out to readers to reclaim the Bible-to rescue it from its misuse by the culture of persecution and from its disuse by those who would seek to end the persecution. In Violence Unveiled, which pursues a Girardian exegesis of scripture as that scripture reads our culture, Gil Bailie illuminates the somewhat surprising tradition of prophecy that I have in mind.
Journal Article
Race and National Identity in Modernist Anthropology and Jean Toomer's 'The Blue Meridian'
KEYWORDS: Jean Toomer, \"The Blue Meridian,\" race, modernist anthropology Jean Toomer's seldom-discussed long poem \"The Blue Meridian,\" which he drafted over a long period beginning in the early 1920s, proposes an amalgamation of race and national belonging in the new type of the \"American,\" Seeing himself as a precursor to this new hybrid, Toomer often polemicized against the limiting logic of race. In proposing such an understanding of race in relation to nation, Toomer drew on the work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Melville J. Herskovits.
Journal Article
BIOGRAPHY AND THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS: ELLISON, TOOMER, JAMESON, AND THE POLITICS OF SYMPTOMATIC READING
As demonstrated by the workings of the political unconscious in Jean Toomer's Cane and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, investigation of authorial biography is an indispensable component of Marxist literary criticism. Symptomatic reading, while derogated by the advocates of \"surface reading,\" remains crucial to textual interpretation.
Journal Article
Me, My Writing, And The South
The ride down to Magnolia, Mississippi was always an event of sorts. An event that would both consume my day free from the bells and whistles of grade school and my time of exploration, which I often used to read and write. “Get on up and get ready fuh church,” my mother bellowed, as she busted open my bedroom’s door, startling me from an adventurous slumber. Wiping my crusted face and stretching my thin, veiny arms, I grudgingly rose from bed to find my church clothes. “Man, why we always gotta go down there. I’m tired of doin’ that,” I said aloud, snatching my clothes from their hangers in my closet. “Cause I said so. Maybe one day you’ll appreciate it,” my mother yelled from her room. She then turned to the gospel music channel on her box TV and the family quietly finished getting ready for our trip down to church.
Journal Article
Figuring and Reconfiguring the Folk: Women and Metaphor in Part 1 of Jean Toomer's \Cane\
By examining the first part of Cane, I suggest that Toomer emphasizes the figurativeness or metaphoricity of the women in the rural South, repeatedly casting them as sites of liminality that resist binaristic and unitary thought about race, region, and gender in favor of an indeterminacy that must be read or interpreted subjectively. [...]Toomer consistently associates the women with a trope of the road, ascribing to them both a mediatory role and a certain portability as he encourages individual interpretations of the folk and thereby a metaphorical recovery of an African American folk identity. More nuanced is William Ramsey's discussion of Toomer's treatment of the South, which posits the folk as \"ahistorical, poetic entities\" through which Toomer constructs a synchronic South in a search for an escape from the \"spiritual vacuity of modernism\" (87), offering the folk as an \"antidote\" to a sterile and mechanistic modern world (79).\\n As with the women in part 1, the notions of the folk and the South remain present throughout Cane as Toomer investigates a connection of the folk to modernity with the trope of the road. [...]while scholars such as Grant frequently read Cane as presenting a quest for redemption that is consistently frustrated (11), Toomer, in casting the Southern women as indeterminable metaphors, leaves open the possibility for a redemptive reconnection with a folk identity, directly linking the first section of the book to the other sections.
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The Education of Milkman Dead: The Bildungsroman as Aesthetic Cycle in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Rational critique of one’s existential condition and questions of why, where, when, who, what dominate Morrison’s Song of Solomon. As she clearly shows in the novel, it is in finding answers to these questions that one is better able to deal with one’s existential condition and, where necessary, to make the transition from fragmentation to wholeness as a subject dealing with the history and experience of a racial formation that renders one either as an object or inferior other. In Song, the site of the exploration of these questions is the familial space and the marginal public constituted by black America, through which their unheard voices are given full play. Straddling the various familial spaces and marginal public is the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, whose growth away from a selfish, materialistic young man Morrison tells magically as a bildungsroman, textual revision, and aesthetic cycle.
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