Worrying the line : black women writers, lineage, and literary tradition
For blues musicians, "worrying the line" is the technique of breaking up a phrase by changing pitch, adding a shout, or repeating words in order to emphasize, clarify, or subvert a moment in a song. Cheryl A. Wall applies this term to fiction and nonfiction writing by African American women in the twentieth century, demonstrating how these writers bring about similar changes in African American and American literary traditions. Examining the works of Lucille Clifton, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker, Wall highlights ways in which these authors construct family genealogies, filling in the gaps with dreams, rituals, music, or images that forge a connection to family lost through slavery. For the black woman author, Wall contends, this method of revising and extending canonical forms provides the opportunity to comment on the literary past while also calling attention to the lingering historical effects of slavery. For the reader, Wall shows, the images and words combine to create a new kind of text that extends meanings of the line, both as lineage and as literary tradition
Print Book, English, 2005
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2005
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xii, 309 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
9780807829271, 9780807855867, 0807829277, 0807855863
56103995
Introduction
Reconstructing lineage, revising tradition in Song of Solomon and Zami
On the line to Dahomey : charting Generations
Recollections of kin : Beloved and The black book
Trouble in mind : blues and history in Corregidora
Writing beyond the blues : The color purple
Extending the line : from Sula to Mama day
Bare bones and silken threads : lineage and literary tradition in Praisesong for the widow
In search of our mothers' gardens and our fathers' (real) estate : Alice Walker, essayist
Epilogue : moving on down the line ..
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