Studies in the Literary Imagination最新文献

{"title":"Newman's Apprenticeship: The Sermons at St. Clement's","authors":"L. Poston","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0012","url":null,"abstract":"On May 25, 1824, a little less than three weeks before his ordination to the diaconate, John Henry Newman wrote to his father, “I am convinced it is necessary to get used to parochial duty early, and that a Fellow of a College after ten years’ residence in Oxford feels very awkward among poor and ignorant people” (Letters and Diaries 175). To be sure, the site of Newman’s prospective curacy, the Old Church of St. Clement’s, was not far distant from the “dreaming spires” of the university: outside the city limits on the London side of the Cherwell river (McGrath, Sermons 5: xviii–xix).1 In its general flavor, however, it was quite different from the academic environment of Newman’s previous eight years. Oxford itself was already undergoing its transformation into a bustling commercial center, and St. Clement’s stood in a parish which had doubled in population from 1800 to 1821 and was to double again over the four years immediately following. In his pastoral and preaching duties at St. Clement’s over the next twenty-one months, during which (in May 1825) he was ordained to the priesthood, Newman could not expect much practical assistance from the septuagenarian Rector John Gutch, under whom the duties of parish visitation appear to have largely lapsed. Newman preached his first sermon at St. Clement’s on Sunday morning, June 27, and presided over his first service the following week. On July 28, just a month after the initiation of his duties, he was writing to his mother:","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"301 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134005523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Wisdom of John Henry Newman","authors":"P. H. Schmidt","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0011","url":null,"abstract":"At first glance the essays in this diverse collection on John Henry Newman may appear to have little in common aside from their primary subject. “Voice of Reason” contains an essay that focuses on the influence of Newman on T. S. Eliot (Oser), another that shows Newman to have been influenced by Jane Austen (Lindley), an essay that examines the significance of Newman’s famous motto cor ad cor loquitur in his argumentative writings (Bradshaw), one that seeks to add to our understanding of the function of reason in Newman’s conception of conscience (Aquino), and one that explores Newman’s apprenticeship as a writer of sermons by looking closely at his early sermon work as a clergyman in the Church of England (Poston). But on a second look a common thread will appear: each of these essays takes seriously the idea that Newman is a crucial intellectual in the history of nineteenth-century literature and that we need to continue the process of understanding his complex work. One danger to this understanding of Newman’s significance, aside from the general turn away from challenging, difficult older works, is the recent focus on Newman’s sanctification and potential sainthood, a focus that, while perhaps raising Newman’s profile among Catholics with little or no interest in his intellectual labors, may have had the effect of dampening interest in Newman among younger students of literature. Fortunately, as we shall see, there has been no corresponding decrease in interest among scholars. One of the effects of the dampening of popular interest has been that fewer and fewer readers know anything about him. Such readers would first learn of Newman from anthologies, but a quick look at the representation of Newman in anthologies tells a disheartening story. The first several editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature contained twenty pages of Newman’s writings, including eleven pages from the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman’s spiritual autobiography. In a 2012 edition of the Norton, the Newman selection has been reduced to eight pages from his Idea of a University, a series of lectures on higher education. In the Norton Major Authors Edition, Newman has disappeared entirely, as he has from the Broadview Anthology’s print versions.","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131089493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Likely Story: Character and Probability in Newman and Austen","authors":"Dwight A. Lindley","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116655221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"No Exit: Mixed-Race Characters and the Racial Binary in Charles Chesnutt and Ernest J. Gaines","authors":"K. Byerman","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0003","url":null,"abstract":"While Ernest J. Gaines has generally emphasized the importance of white writers rather than black ones in his career, he shares with Charles Chesnutt an interest in the role of mixed-race characters in narrative. Repeatedly in his brief fiction-writing career, Chesnutt engaged with both the passing tradition and the status of those who were marked as black though they clearly had white ancestry. Similarly, Gaines, in both novels and short stories, depicted the social and racial pressures on light-skinned characters.1 The focus of this essay will be on narratives of those who have been clearly labeled black regardless of ancestry. While Gaines shows little interest in stories of passing, he shares with Chesnutt a concern for Black Creoles and for those who choose or are compelled to identify as black. The texts I will be examining are Chesnutt's Paul Marchand, F. M. C. and \"The Wife of His Youth\" and Gainess Catherine Carmier and \"Bloodline.\" The two novels treat Creole characters and their status within multiracial and multiethnic societies, while the two stories focus on light-skinned men and their relationships to other blacks as well as whites. Each of these works in one way or another signifies on the tradition of the tragic mulatto/a. For example, there is no deceit or confusion on the part of the central characters about their racial category, as there is in Chesnutts House Behind the Cedars. Nor is there the angst of white and mulatto romance such as we see between Robert and Mary Agnes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Instead, we find a free man of color who turns out to be white, a \"black\" man who has the arrogance and racial superiority of his white father, a family of Black Creoles who are the only members of the community who define themselves as different from blacks, and a light-skinned man who at the end of the story may or may not identify with his black past. Both authors, in effect, depict complex performances of race along the socially constructed boundary that constitutes the color line. Thus, each of them rejects straightforward ideas of essentialism, but does so in the context of his particular historical moment. For Chesnutt, this moment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the time of retrenchment in civil rights, white racial terrorism, and the development of a racial \"science\" that sought to give a biological, social, and anthropological basis for essentialist thinking and policies. Gaines's moment came at the high point of the civil right movement, with the emergence of black nationalism and a reversed claim of essentialism that asserted black moral superiority. Thus, it can be argued that each writer uses mixed-race characters to subvert fixed notions of race while acknowledging the power of such notions in shaping the lives of their characters. It is also worth noting that all four works involve some moral violation that extends beyond white supremacy (which both writers see as a fixed asp","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125340660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Make Him a Man\": Black Masculinity and Communal Identity in Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying","authors":"David E. Magill","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0005","url":null,"abstract":"As many critics have noted, Ernest J. Gaines's novels comprise an extended treatise on black male identity in the United States. Yet the novels do not produce one static viewpoint; instead, they demonstrate Gaines's struggle with the question of black masculinity over the course of his lifetime. His earlier novels, such as Catherine Carmier, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and In My Father's House, represent the difficulties black men face while constructing their masculine identity in the face of structural and individual racism. But with each new novel, Gaines increasingly focuses on his vision for a different black masculinity based in social negotiation. A Gathering of Old Men, for example, presents black men banding together to demand their manhood against white oppression and racism. Gaines's latest novel, A Lesson Before Dying, offers an even more cohesive vision of black manhood and its potential for radical change. The title of Gaines's latest novel stands enigmatically over the text. The reader opens A Lesson Before Dying with several questions to answer: What lesson? Who teaches the lesson? Who learns the lesson? Who dies? Within the first few chapters, these enigmas seem to be easily resolved: the lesson teaches how to be a man, and it will be taught to Jefferson by Grant Wiggins before Jefferson dies in the electric chair. These easy answers, however, prove not to be the whole story, as Gaines problematizes the question of manhood throughout the text. (1) Gaines reproduces rural southern life in the 1940s, then sets up the real issue: what does it mean to be a black man? In answering this question, critics of the novel have divided into two camps: those who see Gaines's answer as defining an individualist masculinity and those who see him as promoting a communal sense of identity. (2) However, critics on both sides must contend with the other side's formulation. This essay will argue that the tension between the individual and the community is vital to Gaines's construction of black masculinity, as he offers us a vision in which individuals must socially construct their individual identities through the locus of communal connections. The traditional definitions given in the novel's first few chapters, definitions rooted in an individualist, phallocentric model, do not work for the African-American male; as bell hooks notes, they do \"not interrogate the conventional construction of patriarchal masculinity or question the extent to which black men have historically internalized this norm\" (89). In an attempt to reverse these ideologies, Gaines defines a different black masculinity in A Lesson Before Dying, a communal, socially constructed masculinity. This new masculinity is a more dynamic system in which reciprocity and responsibility play major roles. Given a South that dehumanizes and oppresses African Americans through the legacy of slavery and the oppression of Jim Crow, Gaines realizes that African-American males must def","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"30 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134446776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: New Criticisms on the Works of Ernest J. Gaines","authors":"L. A. Brown","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Explicit in the canon of Ernest J. Gaines's work is a delicate intertwining of history with universal themes of personal integrity, human dignity, and self-respect. Through simple dialogue and sparse physical descriptions, his work offers homage to ordinary black citizens who not only deserve respect in their everyday lives but also crave it as a matter of order and sensibilities. As a son of the South, Gaines's obsession with the speech, cultural traditions, and mores specific to the Point Coupee Plantation in Oscar, Louisiana, is notable in each of his eight works of fiction. When Gaines left the plantation in 1948, at age 15, to join his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California, he had, by that time, become so enamored with the rural land and its people that he was unable to remove himself psychologically from the region. He maintains that his physical body went to California, but his soul and emotions remained in Louisiana: \"I left, but I didn't leave. Something kept holding me back, holding me back here [the Point Coupee Plantation]\" (Personal Interview). During his formative years on the plantation, Gaines learned the importance of an undesecrated environment, and still, to this day, advocates the joys of southern life untouched by modern industrialization and development. A fierce believer in the unadorned countryside of his upbringing, he writes in Mozart and Leadbelly about his early search for literary works reflective of his rural background; he wanted to \"smell that Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, [and] search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river\" (9). Not abandoning his desire to return to his southern roots, he and his wife, Dianne, returned to Oscar, Louisiana, in 2004. Gaines's experiences on the plantation shaped him, and the memories did not dissolve because of his relocation to the West Coast. On the Louisiana plantation of his birth there were people, he says, \"who knew my grandparents' grandparents ... so something about the [plantation] just kept me here ... and I know that it was because I still felt connected to everything here\" (Personal Interview). While his literary work captures the African-American cultural and storytelling traditions of the rural South, his interest remains grounded in the specific region of his birth: the quarters of the Point Coupee Plantation. It is no secret that much of his strength and fortitude are ancestral, and it is equally no secret that he gives homage to the people who came before him. The Point Coupee Plantation is the place where his power comes from and that allows him to tell the riveting narratives that readers have all come to enjoy: the stories of Miss Jane, Jefferson, Madam Toussaint, Catherine Carmier, Reverend Ambrose, and a host of other characters from his eight works of fiction. While the names of the characters","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133386807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Mr. Joe Louis, help me\": Sports as Narrative and Community in Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying","authors":"Michael A. Zeitler","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Jeffery Folks, in noting the communal function of the Christmas/Easter religious symbolism in Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying, argues that Gaines's \"use of language is grounded in a historical community in which the layers of implied meaning are clearly understood\" (265). Indeed, the events described in the novel take place between October and April, unfolding alongside the annual, timeless, and symbolic cycle of the religious calendar around which the inhabitants of Bayonne, Louisiana, organize and give meaning to their communal lives. Yet Gaines also takes pains to situate his narrative into a more specific chronology--between October 1948 and April 1949. We know that only because Grant Wiggins, the story's narrator, tells us \"Jackie Robinson had just finished his second year with the Brooklyn Dodgers\" (Lesson 87). Grant, himself, is twenty-eight or twenty-nine that fall, approximately Robinson's own age in 1948, and we know that because he tells us he was seventeen at the time of the second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling championship fight. These are A Lesson Before Dying's only outside references to a specific chronology, a defined historical setting, and they are not spelled out for the reader, who is just expected to \"know.\" The references come from a generation of African Americans who might still weave their personal life stories around the chronology of pioneering black sports heroes, athletes who not only battled to win on the playing field, but who faced far greater battles off the field against racism and economic exploitation: anecdotal evidence of which one finds incorporated into other African-American literary classics including August Wilson's Fences, Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Story, and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. To expand Folks's comments, then, one might add that these sports narratives also represent for Gaines and his readers, along with the inhabitants of Bayonne, Louisiana, another, parallel level of communal language. They serve not just to celebrate sports heroes' success; they are exemplum, to use the medieval word, survival stories about keeping one's dignity in a world determined to prove once and for all that such dignity is impossible. Such stories were told in bars and barber shops, over back fences and in front of water coolers, reen-acted by children in schoolyards, and repeated by those who heard them on the radio. This essay takes such iconic sports narratives as its point of entry; I will argue that Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying incorporates the trope of sports narratives in shaping community cohesion and values into its thematic structure to reinforce its \"lesson,\" of living with dignity even when facing a world which refuses to allow it. Like all great novels, A Lesson Before Dying can be approached from any number of perspectives. It is a study of community, an examination of religious faith, a coming-of-age story. It is a story that tells us something about the racism that still ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132805713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Promise Song: Ernest J. Gaines's Early Fictions and the Community of Black Women Writing","authors":"L. Biederman","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0001","url":null,"abstract":"In January 1971, Alice Walker wrote to a senior editor at Dial Press praising Ernest J. Gaines's soon-to-be-published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In her letter, Walker concludes that \"no other American writer has made such an effort to comprehend the strength and rugged tenderness of the black woman in all her courage and rare beauty\" (Letter to William Decker). Later that year, Walker would review Gaines's most recent novel for the New York Times Book Review, characterizing its author as \"much closer to Charles Dickens, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes than he is to Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison\" (116). Locating Gaines in a literary lineage that skews toward Victorian and early modernist writers, Walker follows Gaines's own attempts to distance himself from the contemporary politics of racial strife associated with Wright's and Ellison's work. Walker, meanwhile, places herself in a lineage that includes Gaines. Writing to Gaines in 1969, she confesses, \"I don't [envy you], but I don't because it is possible for me to think of you as a great teacher. I'm still young enough for that\" (Letter to Gaines). Walker's 1969 letter to Gaines and her 1971 letter about Gaines border 1970, often considered a foundational year in what Hortense Spillers calls \"the community of black women writing in the United States\" (249). In that year, Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou published their first books, and Toni Cade's multi-genre anthology The Black Woman was published. Throughout the ensuing decade, critics including Mary Helen Washington, Barbara Christian, and Barbara Smith established a criticism devoted to recovering black women writers, such as Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston, and to articulating a distinct tradition of black women's writing. Many of the significant creative works to come out of this community, including early novels by Morrison and Walker, Gayl Jones's 1975 Corregidora, the short stories of Cade (Bambara) in volumes like Gorilla My Love from 1972, and the poetry of Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and others, are lauded for their attention to, as Walker puts it in her letter to Dial Press, \"the strength and rugged tenderness of the black woman in all her courage and rare beauty\" (Letter to William Decker). By 1970, meanwhile, Ernest Gaines had already published his first two novels, Catherine Cannier in 1964 and Of Love and Dust three years later; Bloodline, a book of short stories, appeared in 1968. Critics of Gaines have typically focused on Gaines's representations of African-American manhood (see, for example, Suzanna W. Jones and, particularly, the incisive work of Keith Clark), and what attention scholars have paid to Gaines's treatment of women generally has been focused on matriarchal elders (see, for example, Marcia Gaudet and Trudier Harris). However, Gaines, in his first four major publications and throughout his ensuing literary career, conside","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127689897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"But I was a little boy, and what could I do about it?\": Contemplating Children as Narrators in the Short Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines","authors":"A. Egan","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Must a narrative be realistic or true to life? Is it the authors responsibility to construct a believable narrative, complete with a realistic structure? These are among the many questions explored by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. The work is considered to be something of a landmark text in respect to narrative theory. To date, the text is best remembered for how it marks the first appearance of the now-familiar term \"unreliable narrator\" (211). In the decades since the work was first published, Booth's term has been vigorously applied to a wide range of texts spanning centuries, genres, and mediums. Scholars who use the term generally do so in order to defend or refute a theory regarding a narrator's trustworthiness or validity as a storyteller. Although the narrators in question vary as widely as the texts that they live in, it is important to note that few groups are seen as unreliable in their narration of a story's events as are child and teenage narrators. Teenage and child narrators who have borne the brunt of this stigma include such iconic figures as Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and myriad others centered in a field of debate and inquiry. Yet this article is not about Holden or Huck. Neither is it intended to weigh the merits of Booths rhetoric nor those whose writings were influenced by his. Rather, the essay is centered on the short fiction of Ernest J. Gaines; I explore the response to the author's use of first-person child narrators in \"A Long Day in November\" and \"My Uncle and the Fat Lady.\" The purpose? To consider them in the context of \"unreliable narrators\" and explore how and why select Gaines scholars and characters in the pieces identify his narrators as such. More precisely, I focus on the possibility that such claims, whether accidental or deliberate, illustrate a cultural bias rooted in an ageist ideology. Subsequently, I enter into brief discussions of a youth lens as a remedy and why Gaines's fiction is of significant use in this debate. Prior to doing so, it is worthwhile to open with a history of narrative unreliability. Booth situates the unreliable narrator and unreliability in general as a consequence of either deliberate irony--in some cases referring to it as \"deception\"--or as a matter of \"inconscience\" on a narrator's part. He attributes the latter term to Henry James, describing how it refers to a \"narrator [who] is mistaken, or [who] believes himself to have qualities which the author denies him\" (159). Booth further insists that the author is the person who determines how a narrator is perceived by an audience. He goes on to stipulate that readers are often in \"collusion\" with the author, complicit and eager in their shared judgment of a narrator. Together, author and readers critique a narrator by \"agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting,\" especially \"when the narrator shows ignorance of matters of fact\" (304). The eagerness readers experience arises from the agreed-upon j","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116828220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Onward Christian Soldier: Reverend Phillip Martin's Road to Redemption in Ernest J. Gaines's In My Father's House","authors":"L. A. Brown","doi":"10.1353/SLI.2016.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/SLI.2016.0002","url":null,"abstract":"If you want to know the end, look at the beginning. --African proverb From the omniscient point of view, Ernest J. Gaines opens his 1978 In My Father's House with a reference to the Reverend Phillip Martin, the charismatic preacher and community activist in the St. Adrienne parish of Bayonne, the principal site of Gaines's fictional works. As the voice of the community's disenfranchised, he enjoys a heightened esteem created in equal parts by the community and himself. His influence extends beyond the province of the community, and he has the establishment's ear on issues of social, economic, and political progress. As a man of the cloth, he believes it is his duty to offer his expert advice to the community on issues impactful to their lives. His communal position, he surmises, is to save souls and preserve the distinction of the residents in all matters of respectability. In full ownership of his social and political standing in the St. Adrienne community, he relishes his position as the community's most revered black male figure. As pastor of the Solid Rock Baptist Church, the most prominent religious institution in the parish, he advocates vociferously on behalf of the oppressed and disenfranchised and is quick to assume the political engagements brought forth by its members. In constructing Phillip in the role of minister and assigning him the last name \"Martin,\" Gaines evokes the social politics and noble endeavors of civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. \"King Martin,\" as Phillip is referenced throughout the parish, is a commanding dignitary among his constituents (In My Father's House 30). In one of the novel's opening scenes, in which he takes center stage during a political gathering at his home, Phillip relishes his guests' hero worship. Their fawning reaches a crescendo: \"The people had begun to applaud Phillip, and he raised his hands for silence.... The people would not stop applauding him\" (In My Father's House 35). The scene not only accentuates his significance in the community, it captures his flair, elegance, and aesthetic contribution to the community, providing him a propitious moment to grandstand as the physical representation of wealth, success, and prosperity: Phillip Martin wore a black pinstriped suit, a light gray shirt, and a red polka-dot tie. He was sixty years old, just over six feet tall, and he weighed around two hundred pounds. His thick black hair and thick well-trimmed mustache were just beginning to show some gray. Phillip was a very handsome dark-brown-skinned man, admired by women, black and white. The black women spoke openly of their admiration for him, the white women said it around people they could trust.... He was very much respected by most of the people who knew him. (34) While his standing in the community frames his identity, an enigmatic past creates the foundation required for a resolution of a haunting, former life. To the degree that the novel is centered upon the emotional and ","PeriodicalId":390916,"journal":{"name":"Studies in the Literary Imagination","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115430389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}