A New look at richard wright’s mind
Posted on October 24, 2012 | No Comments
Haile, James B., III, ed. Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012.
In recent years, there has been a renewal of scholarly interest in Richard Wright. Wright was a vociferous reader of Western philosophy, which he revised and often incorporated into his works. Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright is a distinctive collection of essays that engages, interrogates, and illuminates the philosophical meanings and implications of Wright’s fiction and nonfiction. Thought-provoking and eloquent, this volume makes a vital contribution to Wright studies. Both philosophers and readers of philosophy will find these critically important essays to be of enormous interest.
– Floyd W. Hayes, III. Johns Hopkins University
In this groundbreaking volume, James B. Haile, III, and his cohorts transgress and transcend the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy by critically exploring Richard Wright’s oeuvre. Here Wright is not simply read into the philosophy of literature and philosophical fiction traditions, but his novels, short stories, poems, and essays are also shown to unambiguously challenge, if not ultimately upend, these traditions. Indeed, Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright deftly demonstrates that Wright not only wrote existential-phenomenology-informed fiction, but his prose also often eerily mirrored the oppression, alienation, tragicomic, absurd, and angst-filled realities of African American life, culture, and struggle.
– Reiland Rabaka, author of Forms of Fanonism: Frantz Fanon’s Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization