1st Edition

Racial Blasphemies Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature

By Michael L. Cobb Copyright 2005
    156 Pages
    by Routledge

    160 Pages
    by Routledge

    Racial Blasphemies, using critical race theory and literary analysis, charts the tense, frustrated religious language that saturates much twentieth-century American literature. Michael Cobb argues that we should consider religious language as a special kind of language - a language of curse words - that furiously communicates not theology or spirituality as much as it signals the sheer difficulty of representing race in a non-racist manner on the literary page.

    Introduction Chapter One: Painfully Obvious: Nakedness and Religious Words in Go Tell It on the Mountain Arresting Whiteness: Religious History and Local Color in Wise Blood Chapter Three: She Was Something Holy in a Vulgar Place: The Resanguination of the Word in Brown Girl, Brownstones Chapter Four: Actual Sacrilege: The Blasphemous Narration of Race in Light in August

    Biography

    Michael L. Cobb is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His essays on race, sexuality, and literature have appeared in Callaloo, GLQ, and the University of Toronto Quarterly.