William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Hardcover)

from whitewavedarling

Morrison's essays are both striking and gracefully woven. Her powerful ideas about not just American literature and race, but American identity and ideas of freedom, are unique literary explorations well worth reading for anyone interested in American history and identity or literature. As compos...

from ltimmel

This is an interesting essay (composed as three lectures) focusing on the tremendous importance of what Morrison calls "Africanism" for the white literary tradition in the US. Morrison writes: "Studies in American Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a nonwhite, A...

from RandyMetcalfe

Sometimes I wish that all literary critics were obligated to first serve an apprenticeship as great writers of fiction. Surely, like Toni Morrison, they would then be better able to appreciate the practical challenges and choices writers face. And that might make them more sensitive to what those...

from omame

interesting and well written. she's got some great ideas that made me wish i had an english class to discuss it with.

from Esmeraldus

Toni Morrison is brilliant, as usual. I can't think of another scholar I admire more. I've read her criticism and her novels, and loved both, but her criticism is the most lucid and perceptive...I can't get over it. Her gifts as a novelist bring something to her critical work that few have ever m...