Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In these lectures-turned-essays, Toni Morrison provides a very suggestive approach to the critical study of classic American literature. Arguing that literary whiteness is constituted against literary blackness—freedom against slavery, innocence against experience, civilization against savagery—she calls for the study of what she names as Africanism in literature produced by white writers. This is not so much for the purpose of critical subversion or ideological rallying as for the richer, more complex, and more nuanced study of American literature. She demonstrates this approach in brief analyses of Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl , Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn , and Hemingway's novels. I wish she had more room, in either the lecture series or the book publication, to deploy the approach to the works of Thoreau and Henry James, both reckoned to be American masters. The comment on Melville's Moby Di...

Longinus, in A Treatise on the Sublime, describes Sappho's achievement thus: Do you not wonder how she gives chase at once to soul and body, to words and tongue, to sight and colour, as as if scattered abroad, how, at variance within she is frozen and burns, she raves and is wise? For she is either panic-stricken or at point of death; she is haunted not only by one single emotion but their whole company, All things befall a lover, but she took the extremes of love's history and binding them in one achieved a masterpiece (trans. by Frank Granger). The description is alluring, especially given the fact that, not withstanding the recent discovery of a nearly whole poem, all we have of Sappho's poetry are fragments. And few, therefore precious, are the glimpses of poetry in this ALSC conference where the linguistic currency is made up largely of abstraction. I was glad to encounter a poet I did not know in Sarah Barnsley's talk on "Sappho, Mary Barnard and American Mod...