Pedagogy of description. Projective reading and the ethics of interpretation

This essay limns critique\u27s use of selective or even misleading description to advance ideological commitments, often without drawing explicit attention to those commitments. It posits that this style is especially attractive to identity-based modes of critique that, rather than take an oppositional approach to reading (e.g., reading "against the grain"), enforce a self-identity between the critic and her object. Against this trend, the essay advocates a pedagogy of description that hones the ethics of interpretation at the point of writing about an object\u27s alterity. It focuses on a graduate seminar experience of teaching ekphrasis first through an assigned reading and then through a writing exercise completed in an actual museum space. Students\u27 frustration with a critic\u27s description of certain art works became an opportunity to reflect on their own commitment to writing about objects with care. Building out from that experience, the essay shows how ethics animates post-critique\u27s embrace of wonder and surprise - in teaching as much as in writing. (DIPF/Orig.

Black Best-Selling Books and Bibliographical Concerns: The Essence Book Project

On October 27, 2021, the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) sponsored the first in a series of virtual interviews about the Essence Book Project. Founded by Jacinta R. Saffold, the BSA’s inaugural Dorothy Porter Wesley Fellow, the Essence Book Project is a database of the books that appeared on Essence magazine’s bestsellers’ list from 1994 to 2010. In talking about the project with Kinohi Nishikawa, Saffold highlights how Black best-selling books contribute new paths of inquiry to bibliographical scholarship and explains why it is important to archive contemporary Black print culture. Presented in this article is a modified version of the conversation

Introduction: How American Literature Understands Poverty

Together, the essays in this issue of American Literature stage what is at stake in how literature understands poverty, elucidating not only the problem of poverty but also, and especially, the problem of how we see it. To see poverty differently, they might conclude, is not only a matter of what we see. It is a matter of reflecting on how we see

Reading the Street: Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and the Rise of Black Pulp Fiction

<p>"Reading the Street" chronicles the rise of black pulp fiction in the post-civil rights era from the perspective of its urban readership. Black pulp fiction was originally published in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it consisted of paperback novels about tough male characters navigating the pitfalls of urban life. These novels appealed mainly to inner-city readers who felt left out of civil rights' and Black Power's promises of social equality. Despite the historic achievements of the civil rights movement, entrenched structural inequalities led to America's ghettos becoming sites of concentrated poverty, rampant unemployment, and violent crime. While mainstream society seemed to turn a blind eye to how these problems were destroying inner-city communities, readers turned to black pulp fiction for the imaginative resources that would help them reflect on their social reality. In black pulp fiction, readers found confirmation that America was not on the path toward extending equal opportunities to its most vulnerable citizens, or that the rise of Black Power signaled a change in their fortunes. Yet in black pulp fiction readers also found confirmation that their lives as marginalized subjects possessed a value of its own, and that their day-to-day struggles opened up new ways of "being black" amid the blight of the inner city.</p>Dissertatio