Black Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters (Intersections in Communications and Culture) - Softcover

Richards, Phillip M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820471224 ISBN 13: 9780820471228

Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2005

Synopsis

Black Heart is a provocative and polemical critique of African American literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through a series of sharp and insightful essays on a wide range of critical thinkers, Phillip M. Richards traces what he sees as an erosion of moral reflection in African American literary culture – a process that has left contemporary black academic criticism socially, politically, and culturally hollow. Exploring the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Michael Dyson, Karla Holloway and others, Black Heart sets forth the rhetorical strategies of present-day African American critical writing, and probes the ethical dimensions of its institutional life in the academy, the media, and the public sphere. Richards undertakes to recover the procedures by which cultural and moral value may be recovered for black literary culture and to establish the possibilities for a new humanism in African American writing and literary culture.

About this title

About the Author

The Author: Phillip M. Richards is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. He received a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Chicago. His scholarship, literary criticism, and journalism have been published in a number of professional journals and magazines.

Review

«The essays gathered here offer an insightful and unsparing analysis of the shortcomings and possibilities of contemporary African American literary and cultural criticism. Richards wields his broad and deep understanding of the American and African American literary history with admirable dexterity as he assesses the critical voices that have shaped African American literary and cultural study over the last two decades. Rarely does a critic explore the links between literary criticism and social class with the care and rigor that Richards displays here. Richards’s readings come from a distinct point of view but are never predictable and pretentious. One learns from Richards even on those occasions when one disagrees with him.» (Kenneth Warren, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago)

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0820471224
• ISBN 13: 9780820471228
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 252