1st Edition
Racial Blasphemies Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature
By Michael L. Cobb
Copyright 2005
156 Pages
by
Routledge
160 Pages
by
Routledge
160 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Racial Blasphemies, using critical race theory and literary analysis, charts the tense, frustrated religious language that saturates much twentieth-century American literature. Michael Cobb argues that we should consider religious language as a special kind of language - a language of curse words - that furiously communicates not theology or spirituality as much as it signals the sheer difficulty of representing race in a non-racist manner on the literary page.
Introduction Chapter One: Painfully Obvious: Nakedness and Religious Words in Go Tell It on the Mountain Arresting Whiteness: Religious History and Local Color in Wise Blood Chapter Three: She Was Something Holy in a Vulgar Place: The Resanguination of the Word in Brown Girl, Brownstones Chapter Four: Actual Sacrilege: The Blasphemous Narration of Race in Light in August
Biography
Michael L. Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His essays on race, sexuality, and literature have appeared in Callaloo, GLQ, and the University of Toronto Quarterly.