Unlike most other scholars and writers who have discussed the Harlem Renaissance, he does not view the outpouring of black creativity and cultural expression during the '20s as an anomalous event, a decade's flash in the American literary pan whose import was minimal because it failed to produce modernist masterpieces such as Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Wasteland.Įschewing what he calls a "problematic of failure," Baker replaces it with what he designates as "the mastery of form" and "the deformation of mastery," two concepts that are indicative of his innovative approach to Afro-American literaure. Inspired by what he considers critical misperceptions of the past that perpetually trap critics of Afro-American literature in "a scholarly double bind," Baker redefines the assumptions and the vocabulary of critical discourse. BAKER Jr.'s slender volume presents a provocative approach to Afro-American culture that may eventually expand the vistas of Afro-American cultural and literary thought. MODERNISM AND THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE By Houston A.
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