Postmodern Cautionary Tale of Grassroots Democracy in Charles Johnson's "The People Speak"

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F26482789%3A_____%2F19%3AN0000078" target="_blank" >RIV/26482789:_____/19:N0000078 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://awej-tls.org/?p=2031" target="_blank" >http://awej-tls.org/?p=2031</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol3no1.16" target="_blank" >10.24093/awejtls/vol3no1.16</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Postmodern Cautionary Tale of Grassroots Democracy in Charles Johnson's "The People Speak"

Original language description

Charles Johnson’s 2001 short story collection Soulcatcher was commissioned with the purpose of complementing a PBS series Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery, by way of imaginatively revisiting some memorable events, personalities and generic idiosyncrasies of the antebellum United States. The task of producing literary renditions of such an ideologicallycharged historical period is valuable in its own right, yet it puts considerable constraints upon the artistic autonomy of the writer. As an African American novelist and scholar, Charles Johnson straddles two mildly dichotomous positions in this respect. As a literary scholar, he has criticized the lingering tendency to read and appreciate black fiction as a sociological probe, thereby downplaying its own artistic merits. He particularly deplores the implicit inauguration of a black writer as a spokesperson for his or her race, which may have generated a panoptical reflex within the African American literary community. Johnson regards this reflex as inevitably conducive to tendentious writing which he summarily calls “racial melodrama”. The paper therefore examines one story from the Soulcatcher collection, namely “The People Speak”, which displays overt symptoms of ideological literature. The analysis first identifies some panoptical anxieties within the narrative, but it ultimately looks for intertextual echoes which go beyond the literal frame of the story. In doing so, the paper seeks to point out that Charles Johnson manages to retain a considerable degree of artistic autonomy even when dealing with what seems to be a onedimensional and baldly ideological topic.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60205 - Literary theory

Project

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Continuities

N - Vyzkumna aktivita podporovana z neverejnych zdroju

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies

ISSN

2550-1542

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

3

Issue of the periodical within the volume

1

Country of publishing house

US - UNITED STATES

Number of pages

16

Pages from-to

203-218

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

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