Barack Obama's Literary Legacy: Readings of Dreams from My Father

ISBN-13: 9781137501523 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 214 str.

Henry Veggian; Richard Purcell

Opis

While many studies focus on Obama as a politician, few consider his literary merit. This collection of essays approaches Obama's writings as a negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes, and historical narratives. Obama, in turn, emerges as a notable figure within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.

Recenzje

Reviewer: Gordon Hutner, Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Re: Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope: New Literary and Critical Essays, ed. Richard Purcell and Henry Veggian

You have asked me to assess Purcell and Veggian's proposal for a collection of essays dedicated to the writings of Barack Obama, and I'm happy to comply. The proposal and sample contents you've provided offer sufficient grounds to encourage a contract for this important, overdue project. I think that the project is so long overdue that it is surprising that there has not yet been a selection of critical essays on this scale, though of course there have been several interesting studies of his works already. So it seems to me that the book will meet a need, certainly an ongoing interest, one that will only intensify, I believe, after 2016, at least until President Obama's next book, presumably his meditation on his administration and political career.
Purcell and Veggian seem well qualified to perform this task. Purcell's record of interests may be more directly in line with the issues that the collection takes up, while Veggian's is the surer record of wide-ranging interests and productivity. Taken together, they seem to have created a bright and illuminating set of essays, covering a host of concerns that Obama's writings stimulate. If I had to critique its representative character, I would lament that only one woman has been invited, though she is an estimable figure; it also seems to me that the collection might have done more to connect Obama to an African-American literary tradition, though this is not to gainsay the welcome addition of seeing Obama through the prism of John Lowney's excellent contribution on Frank Marshall Davis. I think in a collection like this, it would not be out of place to have a scholar of gender examine the implications for masculinity studies, though it isn't imperative that the editors include such a piece.
As they stand, the essays seem venturesome and fresh. Konstantinou's very wisely situates Obama's writing in its late '80s' and early '90s cultural contexts. It's smart, adroit, and forceful, essay that speaks directly to the interests of scholars of contemporary fiction. Li's essay promises to take Obama seriously as a political autobiographer, a subject she has carved out for herself, beyond her manifest virtues as a scholar of twentieth-century African-American writing. I have a great deal of confidence in the impact her argument will make. Lowney's, as I have suggested, offers much to admire in situating Obama specifically in a tradition of African-American radical politics, a very original take on Obama's and perhaps a nice contrast for the editors to draw with Konstantinou's perspective in their introduction.
Another pairing that might be highlighted is comprised of essays by Fitzmaurice and Sirvent. Both mean to excavate contexts of Obama's intellectual biography, his connection to Los Angeles literary culture during the formative years of his study at Occidental College, along with his reading of Reinhold Niebuhr. Obviously, there's an unhappy, if unsurprising vagueness in these two scholars' descriptions of their projects. Fitzmaurice will be relying on his ready access to these materials, while Sirvent never seems to focus a thesis but relies on the manifest interest that Christian realist has exerted on the President. There's already something of a bibliography for Sirvent to confront, including a book that also has more relevance for Fitzmaurice than perhaps he is aware: James T. Kloppenberg's Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition, which is the one book every single one of these essays could read with profit, including the editors, but which appears only in a footnote of Lowney's.
Conceivably, Borman's and Pease's essays might also serve as a pair. I admire how Borman ingeniously brings his background as an Afric

Spis treści

Introduction; Richard Purcell and Henry Veggian
1. Genre Instability and Self–Invention in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father; Stephanie Li
2. "Frank–ly Speaking": Frank Marshall Davis, The Black Chicago Renaissance, and Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father; John Lowney
3. Walking on Figs: Obama as Young Writer in Literary Los Angeles; James Fitzmaurice
4. "A Reach Across the Void": Reconstructing the African Family in Barack Obama and Aminatta Forna; David Borman
5. Barack Obama's Postironic Bildungsroman; Lee Konstantinou
6. Niebuhrian Realism in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope; Roberto Sirvent and Neil Baker
7. Barack Obama's Orphic Mysteries; Donald E. Pease

O autorze

Richard Purcell is Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. He is the author of Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture.

Henry Veggian is a Lecturer of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He is the author of Understanding Don DeLillo.

Blurb

President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in which he composed them, social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands "literary" to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful, artful writing brings to the surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form, thereby revealing what Edward W. Said famously defined as the "worldliness" of the literary object. In the case of President Obama's writings, and Dreams from My Father in particular, those relationships are evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes and historical narratives. By positioning the "literary" at this vantage, at the point where writing and the world converge, the volume's contributors assert the indispensable, and urgent, import of understanding the President not only in political terms, but, more importantly, in literary terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.