1st Edition
Street, Text, and Representation in African American Literature Urban Writing/Dwelling
Comprehensive and comparative, this volume investigates African American street novelists since the Chicago Black Renaissance and the semiotic strategies they employ in publication, consumption, and depiction of street life. Divided into three chapters, this text analyzes the content, style, and ethics of “street” narrative through a discursive/rhetorical lens, exploring the development of street literature’s formal and contextual concerns to resolve the sociocultural and political questions surrounding cultural work. The book also gives emphasis to “text” or (post)structural literary analysis by answering questions about the genre’s aesthetic and linguistic techniques that respond to the injustices of urban planning. The last chapter, “Representation,” investigates the phenomenological hermeneutics of more recent street literature and its satire, highlighting the political stakes for authorship, credibility, and subjectivity. Through historical and contemporary studies of urban space, Blackness, and adaptations of street literature, this work attempts to network activists, artists, and scholars with the greater reading public by providing a functional ontology of reading the inner city.
Acknowlegements
Author's Preface
1. Introduction: Writing the Urban Dwelling
Black Literary Authenticity: Humanism versus Pessimism
Aims, Questions, and Methodologies
The Purpose of this Study
The Double-Edged Sword of Urban Sociology
Street Literature as Responding to the Urban Sociological Mythos
A Note on Interpretation and Value
2. Street
Introduction
Preparing to Read the Street
Street Literature at the Intersection of Blackness and Urbanization
The Street Novel: An Urban Differential in Literature
A Close Reading of Two Gen(d)erations in Street Novels: Iceberg Slim
A Close Reading of Two Gen(d)erations in Street Novels: Sister Souljah
Conclusion
3. Text
Introduction: Four Tropes of the Street-as-Text
Temporal Factors Affecting Tropological Semantics
Passing: A Comparative Reading of Himes, Beck, and Tyree
Peddling: A Comparative Reading of Autobiographical Street Fiction
Pandering: A Comparative Reading of Sexual Exchange and Economy
Preaching: A Comparative Reading of Demagogues and Messiahs
Rinehart’s Face(lessness): (De)constructing the Four Tropes
Rinehartism and the Author-Function Problem in Street Literature
Defining Rinehartism with Strong Semantics
Conclusion
4. Representation
Introduction
Language Structures the Expression of (Black) Being
Implications of Language that Frames Being-in-the-Street
The Ethical Work of Street Novels
Satirizing Street Publishing: Tyree and Everett
Satirizing Street Movements: The Fanonian Ontology of Wideman
Satirizing Street Culture: Beatty and Mansbach
The Postmodernism of Street Satire
Conclusion; or, Redefining Street Cultural Production
Introduction
Music
Image
Text
Praxis
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Biography
Mattius Rischard is an Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University-Northern. He received his M.A. and PhD at the University of Arizona from the Department of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Programs, specializing in African American literature of the 20th century, with focus on the urban novel and digital/visual culture. He has taught writing and literature for the University of Arizona, Pima Community College, and as a Writing Assessment Specialist for the University of Texas system. He publishes and presents on sociohistorical, aesthetic, and phenomenological methods for reading the problematics of modernity across academic, popular, and marginal representations of urban life.
