Advances in the History of Rhetoric Jan 2019

Dialoging with Bigger Thomas: A Reception History of Richard Wright’s <i>Native Son</i>

Bryan J. McCann

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay develops a reception history of the Communist Party of the USA’s (CPUSA) responses to Richard Wright’s Native Son. Drawing on what Fiona Paton calls “cultural stylistics,” I argue that the voices residing in Native Son itself participated in the broader interpretive politics surrounding the novel. Specifically, Wright’s primary character, Bigger Thomas, functioned as a disruptive performance of blackness that revealed the limitations of communist orthodoxy for bringing expression to black subjectivity. I conclude by reflecting on the ways cultural stylistics poses salient ethical challenges to all of us who engage in the labor of critique.

Journal
Advances in the History of Rhetoric
Published
2019-01-02
DOI
10.1080/15362426.2019.1569422
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Topics
multilingual writers voice and style

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

Cites in this index (4)

  1. Haskins et al. (2010)
    Totalitarian Visual “Monologue”: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  2. Paton (2000)
    Beyond Bakhtin: Towards a Cultural Stylistics
    College English
  3. Jasinski (1997)
    Heteroglossia, polyphony, and<i>the federalist papers</i>
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  4. Halasek (1992)
    Starting the dialogue: What can we do about Bakhtin's ambivalence toward rhetoric?
    Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Also cites 11 works outside this index ↓
  1. Afflerbach (2015)
    Liberalism’s Blind Judgment: Richard Wright’s Native Son and the Politics of Reception
    MFS Modern Fiction Studies  ↗
  2. Bowman (2000)
    Domestic(Ating) Excess: Women’s Roles in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Its Adaptations
    Text and Performance Quarterly  ↗
  3. Dolinar (2012)
    The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation
     ↗
  4. Felski (2015)
    The Limits of Critique
     ↗
  5. Goldstein (2007)
    Richard Wright’s Native Son
     ↗
  6. Goltz (2011)
    Text and Performance Quarterly
     ↗
  7. Lane (2003)
    The Poverty of Context: Historicism and Nonmimetic Fiction
    PMLA  ↗
  8. Mailloux (1998)
    Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics
     ↗
  9. Miller (1986)
    Bigger Thomas’s Quest for Voice and Audience in Richard Wright’s Native Son
    Callaloo  ↗
  10. Morson (1990)
    Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
     ↗
  11. Murphy (2001)
    Mikhail Bakhtin and the Rhetorical Tradition
    Quarterly Journal of Speech  ↗
CrossRef global citation count: 0 View in citation network →

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