August Wilson

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August Wilson Pub. Date: 2/1/2009 Publisher: Facts on File, Incorporated

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August Wilson Pub. Date: 12/28/2001 Publisher: Chelsea House Publishers

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Overview

August Wilson's group of 10 plays, often referred to as the Pittsburgh Cycle or the Century Cycle, established his reputation as one of the nation's most important, prolific, and honored playwrights. A two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Wilson's vibrant and layered works, including Fences, Two Trains Running, and The Piano Lesson, speak not only to the African-American experience but to the social changes that gripped the United States in the twentieth century. This collection of critical essays features notes on the contributors, a chronology, a bibliography, and an introductory essay by esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781604133936
Publisher: Facts on File, Incorporated
Publication date: 2/1/2009
Pages: 200
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views Series
Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 0.60 (d)

Meet the Author

Harold Bloom

One of our most popular, respected, and controversial literary critics, Yale University professor Harold Bloom’s books – about, variously, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the classic literature – are as erudite as they are accessible.

Biography

"Authentic literature doesn't divide us," the scholar and literary critic Harold Bloom once said. "It addresses itself to the solitary individual or consciousness." Revered and sometimes reviled as a champion of the Western canon, Bloom insists on the importance of reading authors such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer -- not because they transmit certain approved cultural values, but because they transcend the limits of culture, and thus enlarge rather than constrict our sense of what it means to be human. As Bloom explained in an interview, "Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage."

Bloom began his career by tackling the formidable legacy of T.S. Eliot, who had dismissed the English Romantic poets as undisciplined nature-worshippers. Bloom construed the Romantic poets' visions of immortality as rebellions against nature, and argued that an essentially Romantic imagination was still at work in the best modernist poets.

Having restored the Romantics to critical respectability, Bloom advanced a more general theory of poetry. His now-famous The Anxiety of Influence argued that any strong poem is a creative "misreading" of the poet's predecessor. The book raised, as the poet John Hollander wrote, "profound questions about... how the prior visions of other poems are, for a true poet, as powerful as his own dreams and as formative as his domestic childhood." In addition to developing this theory, Bloom wrote several books on sacred texts. In The Book of J, he suggested that some of the oldest parts of the Bible were written by a woman.

The Book of J was a bestseller, but it was the 1994 publication of The Western Canon that made the critic-scholar a household name. In it, Bloom decried what he called the "School of Resentment" and the use of political correctness as a basis for judging works of literature. His defense of the threatened canon formed, according to The New York Times, a "passionate demonstration of why some writers have triumphantly escaped the oblivion in which time buries almost all human effort."

Bloom placed Shakespeare along with Dante at the center of the Western canon, and he made another defense of Shakespeare's centrality with Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, an illuminating study of Shakespeare's plays. How to Read and Why (2000) revisited Shakespeare and other writers in the Bloom pantheon, and described the act of reading as both a spiritual exercise and an aesthetic pleasure.

Recently, Bloom took up another controversial stance when he attacked Harry Potter in an essay for The Wall Street Journal. His 2001 book Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages advanced an alternative to contemporary children's lit, with a collection of classic works of literature "worthy of rereading" by people of all ages.

The poet and editor David Lehman said that "while there are some critics who are known for a certain subtlety and a certain judiciousness, there are other critics... who radiate ferocious passion." Harold Bloom is a ferociously passionate reader for whom literary criticism is, as he puts it, "the art of making what is implicit in the text as finely explicit as possible."

Good To Know

Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1955 and was hired as a Yale faculty member that same year. In 1965, at the age of 35, he became one of the youngest scholars in Yale history to be appointed full professor in the department of English. He is now Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Visiting Professor of English at New York University.

Though some conservative commentators embraced Bloom's canon as a return to traditional moral values, Bloom, who once styled himself "a Truman Democrat," dismisses attempts by both left- and right-wingers to politicize literature. "To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all," he told a New York Times interviewer.

His great affinity for Shakespeare has put Bloom in the unlikely position of stage actor on occasion; he has played his "literary hero," port-loving raconteur Sir John Falstaff, in three productions.

Bloom is married to Jeanne, a retired school psychologist whom he met while a junior faculty member at Yale in the 1950s. They have two sons.

1. Also Known As:
  
  Harold Irving Bloom (full name)
2. Hometown:
  
  New York, New York and New Haven, Connecticut
1. Date of Birth:
  
  July 11, 1930
2. Place of Birth:
  
  New York, New York
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Cornell University, 1951; Ph.D., Yale University, 1955

Editor's Note vii

Introduction Harold Bloom 1

Ghosts from "Down There": The Southernness of August Wilson Patricia Gantt 5

Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson's Dramaturgy: A Case Study Sandra G. Shannon 21

Race, Ritual, Reconnection, Reclamation: August Wilson and the Refiguration of the Male Dramatic Subject Keith Clark 43

Members and Lames: Language in the Plays of August Wilson William W. Cook 77

"We's the Leftovers": Whiteness as Economic Power and Exploitation in August Wilson's Twentieth-Century Cycle of Plays Çi&grave;dem &Uumlet;sekes 87

Images of African Traditional Religions and Christianity in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson Amanda M. Rudolph 103

Booker T. Washington, August Wilson, and the Shadows in the Garden Ladrica Menson-Furr 115

"King August": August Wilson in His Time Philip D. Beidler 131

Radio Golf: The Courage of His Convictions-Survival, Success and Spirituality Margaret Booker 149

Gem of the Ocean and the Redemptive Power of History Harry J. Elam, Jr. 161

Chronology 175

Contributors 179

Bibliography 181

Acknowledgments 185

Index 187

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August Wilson

Overview

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More About This Book

Overview

Product Details

Meet the Author

Harold Bloom

Biography

Good To Know

Table of Contents

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