Playing with Expectations: Postmodern Narrative Choices and the African American Novel(70 Modern American Literature)

Playing with Expectations: Postmodern Narrative Choices and the African American Novel explores a merging of works by African American novelists to promote critical acceptance of postmodern literature and advance the legitimacy and usefulness of postmodern literary techniques. This book examines novels by Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and Toni Morrison, and two novels by comparative newcomer Colson Whitehead – all of whom have used postmodern techniques not only to help their work be read, but to gain a racially wide audience that is open, willing, and able to understand. Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of local narratives and grand narratives helps show how African American novels, using postmodern strategies, function as small-scale narratives. Consequently, these narratives, set up in opposition to hegemonic metanarratives, offer readers an alternative mode of thinking to that offered by the larger, more widely diffused and self-distributing grand narratives. By providing realistic characters in ways that defy the typical grand narratives of race, as well as the expectations of storytelling itself, readers are stimulated into new realizations about previously accepted ideas, and become prepared to spread the now-realized truth about the inaccuracies of the racist grand narratives. This book is a vital and thought-provoking addition to the ongoing conversation about storytelling and race, and will engage readers in classroom discussions dealing with race, postmodernism, or twentieth-century literature in a more general sense.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Lyotard and Metanarratives – Reed, Johnson, Morrison, Whitehead, and Metanarratives – African American Literature, Culture, and Metanarratives – Teun A. van Dijk’s Elite Discourse and Racism – Discourse and Racist Metanarratives – Lyotard and The Postmodern Condition – Postmodern Theory, Postmodern Strategies – Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, and Experiments with Style – Mumbo Jumbo and Expectations of Time and Genre – Fiction vs. Nonfiction, Fiction vs. Reality – Japanese by Spring – Defiance of Expectations in Japanese by Spring and Yellow-Back Radio Broke Down – Flight to Canada’s Postmodern Exposure of Slavery – Issues of African American Identity in Regard to Writing and Rewriting – Middle Passage’s Postmodern Play with Modes of Discourse – Race, Literature, and Johnson – Dreamer: A Novel – Doubling and the Constructedness of Narratives – Appropriation of Authorial Identity, Including Johnson’s Own – Toni Morrison: Beloved, Paradise, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Jazz – Colson Whitehead: The Intuitionist’s Mysterious Narration – Vagary as the Author’s Tool – A New Metaphor for Inhumanity – Intuitionism, Sight, and Invisibility – The Perfect Elevator/Novel – John Henry Days – The Atypical Vignettes – Whitehead and Comic Books – John Henry Days and the Power of Pop – Whitehead and Recursive America.

About the Author :
Preston Park Cooper received his PhD in literature from Kent State University. He currently teaches English at Austin Community College. He wrote two chapters in Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Literature: West Meets East (2011), one of which he presented as a paper at the 2007 MLA conference: «‘A Beautiful Black Butterfly’: Eastern Aesthetics and Postmodernism in Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring.» He has also written book reviews for the African American Review.