Jerry Ward's Blogspot

OWED   ON A RACIAL TURN The African American impact on American literature, whether that writing is classic or just ordinary, makes us self- conscious about language.   What does it do to us?   How do we do things with it?   Once upon a time in the beginning was the N_____word, and the N_____word was all consonants and a hanging letter that pretended to be a vowel.   Often in post-1865 American history, the false vowel is turned downside up to become a device to appease the nation's insatiable rage for race and imaginary retribution. Often the device is a novel. Language.   People who possess more than average cultural literacy allow J. L. Austin, a professor of moral philosophy, to define their constative and performative utterances by way of How to Do Things with Words ( 1962).   They are likely to value Mikhail Makhailovich Bakhtin's Vorprosy literatury i estetiki , translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist as The Dialogic Ima...

ON PRESENTISM Wai Chee Dimock's editor's column on "Historicism, Presentism,   Futurism" ( PMLA 133.2 (2018): 257-263) may have strong impact, minimal impact, or no impact at all upon the thinking of MLA members and others about the utility of humanistic inquiry.   Nevertheless, the column reminds us of how dangerous it is to assume that 21st century scholars share common knowledge, or even value it, in the everyday practices of their lives and work.   If the Modern Language Association is most representative of what obtains in the sites of PWIs, it is reasonable to note that MLA and those sites possess a mere sliver of   cultural literacy regarding what has characterized learning, teaching, and production of knowledge at HBCUs since their emergence in the nineteenth century.   It is   matter of fact, which can be validated by research, that praxis at HBCUs values "situated pedagogy" more deeply than do privileged PWIs. To some degree, what Dimock m...

frican American Impact on Classic American Literature June 19, 2018   To repeat a key word from last week -- -subterfuge , I will say Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" is a masterful expose of subterfuge in the history (verifiable narrative) of the United States and 19th century American literature.   Moreover, a   21st century reader who   recognizes   the evasion may wish to make it a part of her or his equipment for living. She or he may ponder the difference between aesthetic reading and efferent reading under the guidance of Louise Rosenblatt's   The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978). That option is valuable. So too is reading Sterling Stuckey's Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (1994). Melville served his 1855 Putnam magazine audience well; he   serves us well from the distance of 163 years .   Both audiences are made aware of the ambi...

Poem 75 Lenticular scissors cut. Light bleeds. Youth listened. Ancestors sipped coffee from saucers, talked adult, their memories anointing their tongues with homebrewed carrot wine. Those blooming days when care free to care was. Blues baptized. Jazz donated jubilees. Three scores and ten still tragic waves in cosmic comic seas. Five more are lagniappe never promised. Catholic rituals chalice magic. Capital coffins. Chattel coffers. Assiduous aroma of sin, roses, and gin. Old rural self burning young urban ego like the id of a whip lashing the dawn of night. Mea culpa cor ad cor ora pro nobis. Meticulous pyramid pendulum passage. Period. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             June 16, 2018

Keynote--11th Annual Greater New Orleans Regional Adult Education Graduation Ceremony/ Loyola University                             June 16, 2018 THE NECESSITY OF LITERACY It is an honor to share   on this occasion a few ideas about the necessity of literacy in America, and I thank the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans for inviting me to do so.   My gratitude has deep roots in the forty-two years I spent as a teacher in assisting young people to expand their literacy.   My purpose today, however, is to celebrate those who achieved something commendable----passing the HiSet Exam and earning their high school equivalency certification.   I urge them to celebrate themselves for having the determination, will power, and fortitude to demonstrate mastery of the Exam's five subsets --- mathematics,   social st...

African American Impact on Classic American Literature June 12, 2018 Over the next five weeks, we shall have video lectures by Arnold Weinstein on works by Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison and my comments on the authors, which may differ in some degree those Weinstein has chosen to make.   Each of the works has to be thought of with reference to the institution of slavery and the psychological impact of enslavement on the slaver and the enslaved, the master and the slave.   Today's handout on Frederick Douglass' novella The Heroic Slave (1853) introduces the thematic dimensions that are important for understanding Melville's parallel novella Benito Cereno (1855) and mutiny and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which transformed one of her primary sources -- Josiah Henson's life story --- into a sentimental novel teeming with stereotypes.   Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885 ) is the boy...

      Title:                   Richard Wright: An Unending Hunger for Life Author:                                 Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Ph.D.                                 Independent Scholar                                 1928 Gentilly Blvd.                               ...