Weaves a mystery in which imagination and fiction become tangled with reality.

A version of the OpenStax text

Offers a collection of Clarence Major's poetry, fiction, and art, providing critical interpretations alongside each selection.

Examines how six writers reconfigure African American subjectivity in ways that recall postmodernist theory. This book explores how African American social and political movements, African American studies, independent scholars, and traditional cultural forms revisit and challenge the representation of the African American as deviant other. After surveying African American history and cultural politics, W. Lawrence Hogue provides original and insightful readings of six experimental/postmodern African American texts: John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire; Percival Everett’s Erasure; Toni Morrison’s Jazz; Bonnie Greer’s Hanging by Her Teeth; Clarence Major’s Reflex and Bone Structure; and Xam Wilson Cartiér’s Muse-Echo Blues. Using traditional cultural and western forms, including the blues, jazz, voodoo, virtuality, radical democracy, Jungian/African American Collective Unconscious, Yoruba gods, black folk culture, and black working class culture, Hogue reveals that these authors uncover spaces with different definitions of life that still retain a wildness and have not been completely mapped out and trademarked by normative American culture. Redefining the African American novel and the African American outside the logic, rules, and values of western binary reason, these writers leave open the possibility of psychic liberation of African Americans in the West.

In Fingering the Jagged Grain, Keith E. Byerman discusses how black writers such as Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Ernest Gaines have moved away from the ideological rigidity of the black arts movement that arose in the 1960s to create a more expressive, imaginative, and artistic fiction inspired by the example of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Combining a strong concern for technique and craftsmanship with elements of African American heritage including jazz, blues, spirituals, cautionary tales, and voodoo, these writers have created a vital fiction that celebrates the strength and resilience of the black American voice as it recounts the painful details and brutal episodes of black experience.

Interrogating stories told about life after deconstruction, and discovering instead a kind of afterlife of deconstruction, Daniel Punday draws on a wide range of theorists to develop a rigorous theory of narrative as an alternative model for literary interpretation. Drawing on an observation made by Jean-François Lyotard, Punday argues that at the heart of narrative are concrete objects that can serve as "lynchpins" through which many different explanations and interpretations can come together. Narrative after Deconstruction traces the often grudging emergence of a post-deconstructive interest in narrative throughout contemporary literary theory by examining critics as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, and Edward Said. Experimental novelists like Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, Clarence Major, and Kathy Acker likewise work through many of the same problems of constructing texts in the wake of deconstruction, and so provide a glimpse of this post-deconstructive narrative approach to writing and interpretation at its most accomplished and powerful.