Download or read book Beauty in Jean Toomer s Cane written by and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2004-04-06 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: A (1), Southern Connecticut State University (English Department), course: The Harlem Renaissance, language: English, abstract: Jean Toomer is one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance. His major contribution to literature is Cane, a novel comprised of poetry and prose. Cane’s structure is of three parts. The first third of the book is devoted to the black experience in the Southern farmland. The characters inhabiting this portion of the book are faced with an inability to succeed. The second part of Cane is more urban oriented and concerned with Northern life. The writing style throughout is much the same as the initial section with poetry interspersed with stories. The concluding third of the novel is a prose piece entitled “Kabnis” and can be regarded as a synthesis of the earlier sections. Cane is therefore designed as a circle. Aesthetically, it goes from simple forms to complex ones and then back to simple forms. Regionally, it goes from the South up into the North, and back into the South again. The emphasis of Cane is on characters as well as on setting. The sections entitled “Karintha,” “Becky,” “Carma,” “Fern,” “Esther,” “Rhobert,” “Avey,” and “Bona and Paul” illustrate psychological realism and truths about human nature. The reader is drawn into the characters’ lives, and learns by sharing their everyday trials and feelings. Their characterizations become indistinguishably merged with the landscape that surrounds them. Characteristically, beauty functions as a deceptive tool in Cane. Flowers, women, and the word, all of which generally represent beauty, are reduced to emblems lacking dimension in Toomer’s text. Meaning is flawed and violated. The reader is intentionally deceived by the forms of beauty and left with absence instead of significance. By means of linking beautiful images with violent, explosive, and disturbing thematic openings, Toomer confuses his readers’ sense of meaning. In Cane, Toomer moves the reader with deeply beautiful and intricate language by exploring many different kinds of beauty, such as the abstract qualities of aestheticism, the intimacy of nature’s beauty and the immediacy of human beauty. However, though Toomer begins many of his pictures with seemingly beautiful imagery or qualifies a female character in his writing by her beauty, the breakdown of the aesthetic within his work is widespread. Although beauty seems to be in proportion with reality it is rather distorted. It gives way to nightmarish images and relationships. [...]
Download or read book Teaching Jean Toomer s 1923 Cane written by Chezia Thompson-Cager and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cane one of the major works of the Harlem Renaissance and Jean Toomer's imagist masterpiece, is now a part of the canon in Afro-American literature. Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane is a unique literary tool that explores the brilliance and far-sighted vision of Toomer, allowing Cane to be taught holistically as a discovery process, using the blues motif and the poetic essay. This book's text and figures ground a discussion of Cane's enigmatic and figurative language, connecting the Harlem Renaissance to the Negritude Movement and to later Afro-centric literary movements. This book also reviews P.B.S. Pinchback's legacy as a non-Negro, able to pass easily in white society, the influence of Ouspensky, H. L Mencken's critical work, The Paris Brotherhood, and «Saccaharum officinarum-G.» Like the lunar arcs dividing Cane, the book works as an instructional map. The pictures from the first complete production also tell a remarkable story.
Download or read book A Study Guide for Jean Toomer s Cane written by Gale, Cengage Learning and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on 2016-06-29 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Study Guide for Jean Toomer's "Cane," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
Download or read book The Negro Novel in America written by Robert Bone and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Roots of Cane written by John K. Young and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2024-08-23 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer’s Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual “organism,” John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies to avant-garde arts journals to regional magazines with transnational aspirations. Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer’s uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer’s portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.
Download or read book Black Writers White Publishers written by John Kevin Young and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jean Toomer's Cane was advertised as a book about Negroes by a Negro, despite his request not to promote the book along such racial lines. Nella Larsen switched the title of her second novel from Nig to Passing, because an editor felt the original title might be too inflammatory. In order to publish his first novel as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection Richard Wright deleted a scene in Native Son depicting Bigger Thomas masturbating. Toni Morrison changed the last word of Beloved at her editor's request and switched the title of Paradise from War to allay her publisher's marketing concerns. Although many editors place demands on their authors, these examples invite special scholarly attention given the power imbalance between white editors and publishers and African American authors. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature examines the complex negotiations behind the production of African American literature. In chapters on Larsen's Passing, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Gwendolyn Brooks's Children Coming Home, Morrison's Oprah's Book Club selections, and Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, John K. Young presents the first book-length application of editorial theory to African American literature. Focusing on the manuscripts, drafts, book covers, colophons, and advertisements that trace book production, Young expands upon the concept of socialized authorship and demonstrates how the study of publishing history and practice and African American literary criticism enrich each other. John K. Young is an associate professor of English at Marshall University. His work has appeared in journals such as College English, African American Review, and Critique.
Download or read book Cane written by Jean Toomer and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-11-18 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cane" by Jean Toomer. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Download or read book Jean Toomer s Cane written by Daniel Joseph Freeman and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer written by Robert B. Jones and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here -- most of them previously unpublished -- chart a fascinating evolution of artistic consciousness. The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, Symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as "Five Vignettes," while "Georgia Dusk" and the newly discovered poem "Tell Me" come from Toomer' s Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. "The Blue Meridian" and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the editor presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including "Imprint for Rio Grande." "It Is Everywhere," another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as "They Are Not Missed" and "To Gurdjieff Dying." Robert Jones's clear and comprehensive introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker. The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer will prove essential to Toomer's admirers as well as to scholars and students of modern poetry, Afro-American literature, and American studies.
Download or read book Black Poets of the United States written by Jean Wagner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1973 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the evolution of Afro-American poetry, highlighting individual poets up to the time of the Harlem Renaissance.
Download or read book A History of the Harlem Renaissance written by Rachel Farebrother and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.
Download or read book Bucks County Adventures written by Carl Lavo and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-14 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel the byways of Bucks County and discover the many interesting towns, parks and museums in this historic county.
Download or read book American Cocktail written by Anita Reynolds and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating African American woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place in the most interesting times. Actress, dancer, model, literary critic, psychologist, and free-spirited provocateur, Anita Reynolds was, as her Parisian friends nicknamed her, an American Cocktail.
Download or read book Banana Bottom written by Claude McKay and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1974 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Jamaican girl returns to her island home after her English education.
Download or read book The Drum Is a Wild Woman written by Patricia G. Lespinasse and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse—jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album’s cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women’s writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs—cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment—in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance written by George Hutchinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-14 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2007 Companion is a comprehensive guide to the key authors and works of the African American literary movement.
Download or read book Temporary People written by Deepak Unnikrishnan and published by Restless Books. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing "Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.… The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct and serve the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force is not given the option of citizenship. Some ride their luck to good fortune. Others suffer different fates. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called “guest workers” of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. With his stunning, mind-altering debut novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs. Combining the linguistic invention of Salman Rushdie and the satirical vision of George Saunders, Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert. With this polyphony of voices, Unnikrishnan maps a new, unruly global English and gives personhood back to the anonymous workers of the Gulf. "Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.… The author's crisp, imaginative prose packs a punch, and his whimsical depiction of characters who oscillate between two lands on either side of the Arabian Sea unspools the kind of immigrant narratives that are rarely told. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review "Inventive, vigorously empathetic, and brimming with a sparkling, mordant humor, Deepak Unnikrishnan has written a book of Ovidian metamorphoses for our precarious time. These absurdist fables, fluent in the language of exile, immigration, and bureaucracy, will remind you of the raw pleasure of storytelling and the unsettling nearness of the future." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine “Inaugural winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, this debut novel employs its own brand of magical realism to propel readers into an understanding and appreciation of the experience of foreign workers in the Arab Gulf States (and beyond). Through a series of almost 30 loosely linked sections, grouped into three parts, we are thrust into a narrative alternating between visceral realism and fantastic satire.... The alternation between satirical fantasy, depicting such things as intelligent cockroaches and evil elevators, and poignant realism, with regards to necessarily illicit sexuality, forms a contrast that gives rise to a broad critique of the plight of those known euphemistically as ‘guest workers.’ VERDICT: This first novel challenges readers with a singular inventiveness expressed through a lyrical use of language and a laserlike focus that is at once charming and terrifying. Highly recommended.” —Henry Bankhead, Library Journal, Starred Review “Unnikrishnan’s debut novel shines a light on a little known world with compassion and keen insight. The Temporary People are invisible people—but Unnikrishnan brings them to us with compassion, intelligence, and heart. This is why novels matter.” —Susan Hans O’Connor, Penguin Bookshop (Sewickley, PA) “Deepak Unnikrishnan uses linguistic pyrotechnics to tell the story of forced transience in the Arabian Peninsula, where citizenship can never be earned no matter the commitment of blood, sweat, years of life, or brains. The accoutrements of migration—languages, body parts, passports, losses, wounds, communities of strangers—are packed and carried along with ordinary luggage, blurring the real and the unreal with exquisite skill. Unnikrishnan sets before us a feast of absurdity that captures the cruel realities around the borders we cross either by choice or by force. In doing so he has found what most writers miss: the sweet spot between simmering rage at a set of circumstances, and the circumstances themselves.” —Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane “Deepak writes brilliant stories with a fresh, passionate energy. Every page feels as if it must have been written, as if the author had no choice. He writes about exile, immigration, deportation, security checks, rage, patience, about the homelessness of living in a foreign land, about historical events so strange that, under his hand, the events become tales, and he writes tales so precisely that they read like history. Important work. Work of the future. This man will not be stopped.” —Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution “From the strange Kafka-esque scenarios to the wholly original language, this book is amazing on so many different levels. Unlike anything I've ever read, Temporary People is a powerful work of short stories about foreign nationals who populate the new economy in the United Arab Emirates. With inventive language and darkly satirical plot lines, Unnikrishnan provides an important view of relentless nature of a global economy and its brutal consequences for human lives. Prepare to be wowed by the immensely talented new voice.” —Hilary Gustafson, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI) “Absolutely preposterous! As a debut, author Unnikrishnan shares stories of laborers, brought to the United Arab Emirates to do menial and everyday jobs. These people have no rights, no fallback if they have problems or health issues in that land. The laborers in Temporary People are sewn back together when they fall, are abandoned in the desert if they become inconvenient, and are even grown from seeds. As a collection of short stories, this is fantastical, imaginative, funny, and even more so, scary, powerful, and ferocious.” —Becky Milner, Vintage Books (Vancouver WA)
