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Loading... Counternarratives (original 2015; edition 2015)by John Keene (Author)
Work InformationCounternarratives by John Keene (2015)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I've put off writing a review of this book for months, because I wanted to do justice to it. I can't. It's really good, really intelligent--Keene can write, and despite setting himself up for intellectual failure (the obvious problem with 'counternarratives' being that they create a Manichean world), he doesn't fail. The moral horrors of racism in the Americas are made entirely plain, as are the mechanisms used to keep it in place, but they're never attributed to some evil cabal. They are the social structures that form us. And technically, this is a lesson in combining formal skill and intellectual ambition with emotional heft. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Ranging from the seventeenth century to the present, and crossing multiple continents,Counternarratives draws upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, and interrogation transcripts to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present. "An Outtake" chronicles an escaped slave's take on liberty and the American Revolution; "The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows" presents a bizarre series of events that unfold in Haiti and a nineteenth-century Kentucky convent; "The Aeronauts" soars between bustling Philadelphia, still-rustic Washington, and the theater of the U. S. Civil War; "Rivers" portrays a free Jim meeting up decades later with his former raftmate Huckleberry Finn; and in "Acrobatique," the subject of a famous Edgar Degas painting talks back. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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