Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane

Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane
Author: Chezia Thompson-Cager
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2006
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780820424927

Cane one of the major works of the Harlem Renaissance and Jean Toomer's imagist masterpiece, is now a part of the canon in Afro-American literature. Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane is a unique literary tool that explores the brilliance and far-sighted vision of Toomer, allowing Cane to be taught holistically as a discovery process, using the blues motif and the poetic essay. This book's text and figures ground a discussion of Cane's enigmatic and figurative language, connecting the Harlem Renaissance to the Negritude Movement and to later Afro-centric literary movements. This book also reviews P.B.S. Pinchback's legacy as a non-Negro, able to pass easily in white society, the influence of Ouspensky, H. L Mencken's critical work, The Paris Brotherhood, and «Saccaharum officinarum-G.» Like the lunar arcs dividing Cane, the book works as an instructional map. The pictures from the first complete production also tell a remarkable story.

A Jean Toomer Reader

A Jean Toomer Reader
Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1993
Genre: African Americans
ISBN: 0195083296

Jean Toomer achieved instant recognition as a critic and thinker in 1923 with the publication of his novel Cane, a harsh, eloquent vision of black American hardship and suffering. But because of his reclusive, introspective nature, Toomer's fame waned in later years, and today his other contributions to American thought and literature are all but forgotten. Now, this collection of unpublished writings restores a crucial dimension to our understanding of this important African American author. Thematically arranging letters, sketches, poems, autobiography, short stories, a play, and a children's story, Frederik Rusch offers insight into Toomer's mind and spirituality, his feelings on racial identity in America, and his attitudes toward and ideas about Cane. Rusch highlights Toomer's reflections on America, its people, landscape, and politics, reveals his significance for the problems and issues of today, and helps us understand Toomer not only as writer, but also as social critic, prophet, mystic, and idealist. Exploring Toomer's attempts to find self-realization and transcend social and cultural definitions of race, this book offers a unique view of the United States through the life of one of its most significant and fascinating intellectuals.

Cane

Cane
Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2021-01-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1513276050

A series of vignettes exploring African American life as it relates to social, political and family dynamics. For many, Cane is considered a literary masterpiece from visionary writer, Jean Toomer. He presents a diverse collection of tales with distinct and vibrant characters who populate a world that’s all too familiar. HEADLINE: Jean Toomer delivers a vivid depiction of America in the early twentieth century that centers the Black experience, consisting of family, religion, romance and race. It’s a detailed work of fiction that’s closely rooted in reality. A collection of disparate stories illustrating the challenges and motivations of Black people in the United States. The author uses poetry and imagery to create a world that’s recognizable but also unique. In “Seventh Street,” the narrative follows the happenings of a historic neighborhood with links to World War I and Prohibition. There’s also “Blood Burning Moon," which highlights a volatile love triangle that leads to tragic results. It’s an insightful read that introduces outsiders to a different point of view. Jean Toomer’s Cane is highly revered for its unique structure and compelling storytelling. It presents a brilliant contrast of rural and urban living, while acknowledging the racial disparities of both. This modern classic was crucial in establishing and cementing Toomer’s literary legacy. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Cane is both modern and readable.

The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer

The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer
Author: Robert B. Jones
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2014-02-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1469616416

This volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here -- most of them previously unpublished -- chart a fascinating evolution of artistic consciousness. The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, Symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as "Five Vignettes," while "Georgia Dusk" and the newly discovered poem "Tell Me" come from Toomer' s Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. "The Blue Meridian" and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the editor presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including "Imprint for Rio Grande." "It Is Everywhere," another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as "They Are Not Missed" and "To Gurdjieff Dying." Robert Jones's clear and comprehensive introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker. The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer will prove essential to Toomer's admirers as well as to scholars and students of modern poetry, Afro-American literature, and American studies.

The Letters of Mina Harker

The Letters of Mina Harker
Author: Dodie Bellamy
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1635901596

Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ... --Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker sought to resuscitate the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and reimagine her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s--a woman not unlike Dodie Bellamy. Harker confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four different men in a series of letters. Vampirizing Mina Harker, Bellamy turns the novel into a laboratory: a series of attempted transmutations between the two women in which the real story occurs in the gaps and the slippages. Lampooning the intellectual theory-speak of that era, Bellamy's narrator fights to inhabit her own sexuality despite feelings of vulnerability and destruction. Stylish but ruthlessly unpretentious, The Letters of Mina Harker was Bellamy's first major claim to the literary space she would come to inhabit.

A Country of Ghosts

A Country of Ghosts
Author: Margaret Killjoy
Publisher: AK Press
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2021-11-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1849354499

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life. A Country of Ghosts is a novel of utopia besieged and a tale that challenges every premise of contemporary society.

A Dog's Ransom

A Dog's Ransom
Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2002-08-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393345696

Long out of print, this Highsmith classic resurfaces with a vengeance. The great revival of interest in Patricia Highsmith continues with the publication of this novel that will give dog owners nightmares for years to come. With an eerie simplicity of style, Highsmith turns our next-door neighbors into sadistic psychopaths, lying in wait among white picket fences and manicured lawns. In A Dog's Ransom, Highsmith blends a savage humor with brilliant social satire in this dark tale of a highminded criminal who hits a wealthy Manhattan couple where it hurts the most when he kidnaps their beloved poodle. This work attesets to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).

Brother Mine

Brother Mine
Author: Jean Toomer
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2010-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0252035402

"Unusually valuable for the history of modernism. This fascinating correspondence will create further interest in Toomer, Frank, and the mixed-race environment of the 1920s."---Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Telling Women's Lives: The New Biography --

Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History

Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History
Author: Charles Scruggs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1998
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780812234510

In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr examine original sources to show how the cultural wars of the 1920s influenced the shaping of Toomer's writing and subsequent efforts to escape the racial definitions of American society.

Reading Jean Toomer's 'Cane'

Reading Jean Toomer's 'Cane'
Author: Gerry Carlin
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2014-03-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1847603343

Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is regarded by many as a seminal work in the history of African American writing. It is generally called a novel, but it could more accurately be described as a collection of short stories, poems and dramatic pieces whose stylistic indeterminacy is part of its unique appeal. The ambiguities and seeming oddities of Toomer's text make Cane a difficult work to understand, which is why this lucid, accessible guide is so valuable. Exploring some of the difficulties that both the writer and his work embody, Gerry Carlin offers an enthralling account of Toomer's eloquent and exquisite expression of the African American experience. The Author Dr Gerry Carlin is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton. He teaches, researches and has published in the areas of modernism, critical theory, and the literature and culture of the 1960s.