Jerry Ward's Blogspot

    The Crisis of   Reading the African American Novel The idea   that we have a crisis of reading the novel, regardless of how the text is located in our culture, is at once an absolute lie and a relative truism.   A crisis of reading parallels the threadbare crisis of the humanities. It is at best   an affective   way of speaking about fears, cowardice, Afrofuture fantasy and confusions.   Truth be told, the race- and ethnic-marked crisis of reading is at bottom a failure to identify contemporary   novels which can be as mind-opening   as Richard Wright's Native Son Octavia Butler's Kindred , Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima ,   N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn , Ann Petry's The Street , John Oliver Killens' 'Sippi , Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo , Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God or Toni Morrison's   The Bluest Eye .   It seems our post-whatever novelists are more incarcerated in their egos...