Eduardo Santiago reviewed Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison (The William E. Massey, Sr. lectures in the history of American civilization ;)
Review of 'Playing in the dark' on 'Goodreads'
I shouldn't have read this book. I am not the target audience; chances are, you aren't either. This is a scholarly critical work, the kind with sentences like "establishing hierarchic difference to its surrogate properties as self-reflexive meditations on the loss of of difference". The kind that some academics swoon over, the kind that Alan Sokal so famously riffed; and if it wasn't for the seriousness of her subject matter -- the tragic absence of African voices in American literature -- I would be convinced that she, too, was poking fun at the academics. As it is, I don't know. I'm not smart or educated enough to understand even one sentence in ten, let alone figure out her tone.
If you read and study Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Twain, and Poe; if you use "allegorical figuration" and "pleonastic reinforcement" in everyday conversation; by all means read this book. Have fun …
I shouldn't have read this book. I am not the target audience; chances are, you aren't either. This is a scholarly critical work, the kind with sentences like "establishing hierarchic difference to its surrogate properties as self-reflexive meditations on the loss of of difference". The kind that some academics swoon over, the kind that Alan Sokal so famously riffed; and if it wasn't for the seriousness of her subject matter -- the tragic absence of African voices in American literature -- I would be convinced that she, too, was poking fun at the academics. As it is, I don't know. I'm not smart or educated enough to understand even one sentence in ten, let alone figure out her tone.
If you read and study Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Twain, and Poe; if you use "allegorical figuration" and "pleonastic reinforcement" in everyday conversation; by all means read this book. Have fun with it. Otherwise, don't bother. Morrison has so much more to offer us mortals.
