| In this provocative study, Shelly Brivic presents the history
of the twentieth-century American novel as a continuous narrative
dialogue between white and black voices. Exploring four of the
most renowned and challenging works written between 1930 and
1990—William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Richard Wright's
Native Son, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Toni Morrison's
Beloved—Brivic traces how these works progress through
the interaction of white and black perspectives toward confronting
the calamity of slavery and its reverberating aftermath and
continuing legacy.
Brivic shows how one novel leads ineluctably to the next
and how the four works in the deepest sense form one continuous
narrative. Faulkner's attack of the racial system in Absalom,
Absalom! in the 1930s, Brivic explains, opened up a literary
space for Wright's devastating novel of protest. Through the
character of Bigger Thomas, Wright's Native Son exposes
a virtually incurable division in American ideologies, which
leads to the multiplying perspectives of postmodernism in
Pynchon's V. Arriving at the crest of the civil rights
movement, V. questions Western systems of control,
laying a foundation for a world outside the white one, and
so providing a basis for the African view of reality presented
in Morrison's Beloved.
The emergence of African consciousness in American literature
exemplified across these works has had, and continues to have,
Brivic concludes, the potential not only to redress ongoing
injustices but to bring about a new conception of the American
universe and its laws of reality.
Striking in both the selection of novels and the connections
Brivic draws among them, Tears of Rage advances understanding
of the destructive nature of racism and the possibilities
for overcoming its effects through literature.
A professor of English at Temple University, Shelly
Brivic is the author of four books, including Joyce's
Waking Women: An Introduction to "Finnegan's Wake" and
Joyce the Creator.
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