{"product_id":"9780253111203","title":"Charles Johnson's Novels: Writing the American Palimpsest","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"This is truly a major contribution to African American literary\u003cbr\u003e criticism, and it promises to elevate Johnson to the place in the literary firmament\u003cbr\u003e he so richly deserves.\" -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard\u003cbr\u003e University\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCharles Johnson came of age during the Black Arts\u003cbr\u003e Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His fiction bears the imprint of his formal\u003cbr\u003e training as a philosopher and his work as a journalist and cartoonist with a\u003cbr\u003e well-honed interest in political satire. Mentored by the American writer John\u003cbr\u003e Gardner, Johnson is preoccupied with questions of morality, which are informed by\u003cbr\u003e his knowledge of Continental and Asian philosophical\u003cbr\u003e traditions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this book, Rudolph Byrd examines Johnson's four\u003cbr\u003e novels -- Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tale, Middle Passage (National Book\u003cbr\u003e Award Winner), and Dreamer -- under the rubric of philosophical black fiction, as\u003cbr\u003e art that interrogates experience. Byrd contends that Johnson suspends, shelves, and\u003cbr\u003e brackets all presuppositions regarding African American life. This bracketing\u003cbr\u003e accomplished, the African American experience becomes a pure field of appearances\u003cbr\u003e within two poles: consciousness and the people or phenomena to which it is\u003cbr\u003e related.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJohnson's principal themes are identity and liberation.\u003cbr\u003e Intent upon the liberation of perception, for the reader and the writer, Johnson's\u003cbr\u003e fiction aims at \"whole sight,\" encompassing a plurality of meanings across\u003cbr\u003e a symbolic geography of forms, texts, and traditions from within the matrix of\u003cbr\u003e African American life and culture. And like a palimpsest, Johnson's texts contain\u003cbr\u003e multiple layers of meaning of disparate origins imprinted over time with varying\u003cbr\u003e degrees of visibility and significance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCharles Johnson's Novels\u003cbr\u003e will appeal to fans of the writer's work, but it also will serve as a helpful guide\u003cbr\u003e for readers newly introduced to this brilliant contemporary American\u003cbr\u003e writer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Indiana University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47067783233776,"sku":"9780253111203","price":17.55,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780253111203_p0.jpg?v=1763680918","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780253111203","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}