Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Toni Morrison is brilliant, as usual. I can't think of another scholar I admire more.

I've read her criticism and her novels, and loved both, but her criticism is the most lucid and perceptive...I can't get over it. Her gifts as a novelist bring something to her critical work that few have ever matched.

Maybe no one working today. She elevates criticism to poetry:

For young America, [Romance] had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics of the search for self-valorization and validation--above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror--and terror's most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all of the connotative value it awakened.

Highly recommended, highly readable, and very short. You can get this into an afternoon easily, although I didn't, and it deserves re-reading.

Her Nobel lecture is also an incredible read that deserves its own post.