The Dialect of Modernism by North

The Dialect of Modernism by North

The second volume in Oxford's new Race and American Culture series, The Dialect of Modernism uncovers the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Rebelling against the standard language, and literature written in it, modernists, such as Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers in their work. In doing so, they made possible the most radical representational strategies of modern literature, which emerged from their attack on the privilege of standard language. At the same time, however, another movement, identified with Harlem, was struggling to free itself from the very dialect the modernists appropriated, at least as it had been rendered by two generations of white dialect writers. For writers such as Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, this dialect became a barrier as rigid as the standard language itself. Thus, the two modern movements, which arrived simultaneously in 1922, were linked and divided by their different stakes in the same language. In The Dialect of Modernism, Michael North shows, through biographical and historical investigation, and through careful readings of major literary works, that however different they were, the two movements are inextricably connected, and thus, cannot be considered in isolation. Each was marked, for good and bad, by the other.

All readers..will be hard-pressed to deny North's revisionary insight for twentieth-century literary studies: black dialect as performance is an unrecognized bridge between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. With North's generative paradigm, we can examine the movements together in new ways. * American Literature *

Michael North is an English professor at UCLA who has written four books, including The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (OUP 1994). He's written and spoken about a wide range of topics in modern society, including literature, politics, and the arts.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780195122916
ISBN 10	0195122917
Titel	The Dialect of Modernism
Autor	Michael North
Serie	Race And American Culture
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	Oxford University Press Inc
Erscheinungsjahr	1998-08-06
Seitenanzahl	272
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
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