Roman Clodia’s Reviews > Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon > Status Update

'If race is hidden, and we are forced to find it, then we learn not much about race, but a great deal about racist discourse. Faulkner serves up to us this racist discourse in all its futility, madness, incoherence and obsessiveness.'

'... like other American writers, especially those we associate with modernism, [Gertrude] Stein felt free to experiment with sexuality in narrative, felt the subject palatable if the object upon which these experiments are carried is Africanist.'

'The enabling role of Africanism for men becomes disabling for women. What supports white male hegemony does not seem to offer similar support to white women'

'He read Swift, discussed the Christian commandment to "love one another" and is described as "strangely" insensitive to the suffering of his slaves.'

'... at the heart of the American enterprise was the construction of a new, white male.'

'This book grew from the belief that my mother's teaching materials, her lectures, essays, and notes to students, deserve to stand with her published work.'