Josh Brown’s Reviews > The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism > Status Update
Josh Brown
is on page 55 of 352
“Whereas signification depends for order and coherence on the exclusion of unconscious associations which any given word yields at any given time, Signification luxuriates in the inclusion of the free play of these associative rhetorical and semantic relations.”
— Feb 28, 2023 05:20AM
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Josh Brown
is on page 69 of 352
“The Monkey ‘tropes-a-dope’ the Lion, by representing a figurative statement as literal, depending on the Lion’s thickness to misread the difference.”
— Mar 01, 2023 05:04AM
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Feb 28, 2023 05:33AM
“The Afro-American rhetorical strategy of Signifyin(g) is a rhetorical practice that is not engaged in the game of information-giving, as Wittgenstein said of poetry. Signifyin(g) turns on the play and chain if of signifiers, and not on some supposedly transcendent signified.” (58)
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“Of the many colorful figures they appear in black vernacular tales, perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey. The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey, he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language, is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed our trope of chiasmus, repeating and reversing simultaneously as he does in one deft discursive act” (57)
