TY - BOOK AU - Taylor,Carole Anne TI - The Tragedy and Comedy of Resistance: Reading Modernity Through Black Women's Fiction T2 - Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction SN - 9780812235104 AV - PS374.N4 U1 - 813.509928708996 21 PY - 2017///] CY - Philadelphia : PB - University of Pennsylvania Press, KW - African American women in literature KW - African American women KW - Intellectual life KW - African Americans in literature KW - American fiction KW - African American authors KW - History and criticism KW - Women authors KW - 20th century KW - Modernism (Literature) KW - United States KW - Women and literature KW - History KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African-American KW - bisacsh KW - African Studies KW - African-American Studies KW - Cultural Studies KW - Literature N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Prologue: Ideologies of the Terrible and the Funny --; Part I. Revising Postmodernity: Storytelling as Theory --; 1. The Tragedy of Slavery and the Footprints' Fit: Vicarious Witnessing in Beloved --; 2. Humor, Subjectivity, Unctuousness: The Case of Laughter in The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place --; 3. Tragedy and Comedy Reborn(e): The Critical Soul-Journeys in A Question of Power and The Salt Eaters --; Part II. Reading Recursively: Against Modernism's Apartheid --; 4. Who Owns the Terror in Absalom, Absalom!?: Quentin's Marriage and Clytie's Fire --; 5. Literary Passing: Ida, "Melanctha," and the Andrew-gyne --; 6. World-Traveling as Modal Skid: Hurston and Vodou --; Epilogue: Critical (Post)modernity: At the Borders of Arrogance and Possibility --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - Carole Anne Taylor explores the network of cultural relations that links tragic and comic theory to views of what can or cannot be known or felt and what can or cannot be done. Reconceiving tragic and comic resistance through readings of works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, and South African-born Bessie Head, she demonstrates how these writers elaborate the interconnections between a comedy that affirms wholesome normalcy in the face of terror and a tragedy that finds something terribly wrong in the social order itself. Paradoxically, she contends, these works place the highest value not on texts, reading, and writing, but on actual relationship and social action. Looking backward, Taylor next does a "recursive reading" of some problematic works by William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston that have often been considered precursors of the "postmodern." Reading these earlier authors under the influence of contemporary texts and current theory explains modern artfulness or its lack, even when representations of the terrible and the funny offer conflicted relations to power and conflicted sites for readerly response. Taylor argues that the ellipsis of certain tragic and comic modes, particularly in theories of how and when the modern becomes the postmodern, corresponds to the repression of intercultural dialogue on a broader scale. Throughout, she makes a strong case that the tragedy and comedy of resistance should lie at the heart of theories of a critical (post)modernity--and can illuminate the connections between how to read and how to live in the world UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512819595 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781512819595 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781512819595/original ER -