Loose Canons

...Literature goes its own way and has its own laws of being...

...Gates simple doesn't believe that such a pursuit is any more than a mask for partisanship...

...But this volume does little to further DuBois's noble vision of intellectual sharing: "I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not...

...Gates makes several friendly remarks about the Western humanistic tradition and the idea of outreach...

...In the best tradition of Marxist literary analysis and appreciation, Leon Trotsky could not bring himself to believe in proletarian literature as a meaningful category...

...Madonna will star in James's Daisy Miller...

...After a year at Duke University during which he was subjected to various kinds of small-minded criticism, he was offered the W.E.B...

...I suppose this is the vision, anyway...

...Acting as a kind of cultural environmentalist, Gates exposes the offenders and proposes solutions...

...He has written for the New York Times and The Atlantic, among other publications...

...What's wrong with this picture...

...is a scholar and essayist in the field of Afro-American literature who has brio, deep learning, and wit...

...Gates makes mincemeat out of politicians who cry crocodile tears over the decline of traditional values in education: "you have to imagine James Baker curling up with the Four Quartets, Dan Quayle leafing through the Princess Cassimassima...

...His chapter called "Canon Confidential" is a send-up of the why-we-read-the-classics brouhaha...

...The reader will laugh a good deal, find out many interesting things about minority discourse, and very likely be exhilarated and irritated within the frame of a chapter...

...Commonweal the Difference It Makes" highlights the Age of Reason's most unreasoning attitudinizing...

...The imperatives of Gates' s work are not likely to be congenial to readers who are distrustful of or indifferent to collective attitudes...

...Loose Canons—like many postmodern works influenced by French theory—is essentially disdainful of humanism and immersed, for all its good humor, in the by now fairly tired notion that literature and ideas of literary quality are products of domination...

...But ultimately it all comes down to his suspicion of the pursuit of "knowledge for its own sake...

...Gates feels that this breaking down of literary and intellectual hierarchies—this "de-centering"— is inevitable given a world "profoundly fissured by nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender...

...The study is a pioneering analysis of Afro-American and other black language patterns, metaphors, and rhetorical strategies as they appear in literature ranging from folktales to novels by Ralph Ellison and Ishmael Reed...

...The monkey in this title is a trickster figure in the myths of Africa and the New World who provides a new and ironic voice through his cutting and humorous "signifying...

...Literature is "the most pervasive emblem of capitalist commodity functions...

...To them Professor Gates will seem to be a brilliant advocate of a questionable position...

...Very likely there are many lovers of books today who will perceive the clarion call of multicultur-alismasjust another chilling demand...

...DuBois Professorship in the Humanities at Harvard and the opportunity to redirect a languishing program in black studies...

...In dismissing the positions of the Plato scholar and traditionalist Allan Bloom and the radical professor Leonard Jeffries in one sentence, Gates shows his relish for controversy and imaginative 22:18 December 1992 yokings...

...He is a professor of English at Pace University in New York City...

...In the 1980s the novelist Milan Kundera rejected the "Grand March" toward freedom—the insistent rhetoric of the Left—and found it so much hot air that contributed to "the unbearable lightness of being...

...Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls...

...In our century very different minds have recoiled from the idea of harnessing creative work to political beliefs...

...But his insistence on the primacy of the power drive in literary history drowns out other considerations and makes this book seem unconcerned with such hopelessly old-fashioned things as the beauty and spiritual value of great literature...

...Detective Sam Slade finds out the traditional literary canon is a protection racket, that the big time critics like Harold Bloom at Yale are thugs who knock off "Tommy" (T.S...

...He quotes John Henry Newman on the liberally educated mind and its capacity to view many things as a whole...

...he claims to believe in a "middle way" between black nationalistic literary Commonweal culture and Western humanism...

...Unfortunately Gates' s excellent point about black authors writing themselves into existence against this backdrop of rank bigotry is marred by his sloppy attacks on authority and the value of white male teachers...

...While being something of an ideologue on the literary canon and the injustices of the Western tradition, he is also a gift to his readers and a rarity in contemporary critical circles: he is a spokesman for radical revision in the humanities who is not lathered up and driven by resentment...

...The central concerns of his career have been the discovery of black literary texts, the analysis of these works, and their incorporation into the world community of letters...

...True enough, Gates is above the level of cant about Dead White Males like Plato who knew all the right people...

...DAVID CASTRONOVO has written books on literary and cultural subjects, including his latest volume The American Gentleman (Continuum...

...Altogether, his essays—gathered under the section headings of "Literature," "The Profession," and "Society"—are about as far as one can get from the typical volume of edited academic papers...

...He also neglects to show readers that Kant's opin-ion-mongering and nonsense commentary, like Ezra Pound's political ranting, is not philosophy at all and does not speak as loudly as well-structured argument...

...PATRICIA WINDSOR, formerly with the National Catholic Reporter, now reports for the Ann Arbor News...

...Jefferson, Hume, and Kant are caught at their worst, writing absurd and offensive things about the paucity and inferiority of black writers...

...Writing, 'Race,' and RAND RICHARDS COOPER spent several years working and traveling in Africa...

...Such enterprises, of course, should be placed under the general heading of multiculturalism, a conception of literary culture and education which Gates defends against abuse as he writes about a "poly-centric" canon of books...

...One of the master themes in the book is the abuse of power in the realm of communication and the ways in which everyone from Jefferson to Ted Turner can fool us...

...Gates includes another somewhat less clever Sam Slade piece called "The Big Picture" about Ted Turner buying up classic works for television: there will be a high-speed chase at the end of Emerson's Journals...

...Of course there are reassurances from Gates: he has trouble tolerating fanatical antitra-ditionalists, victimization trendies, and other ideologues...

...He seems to think that Alice Walker's fairly obvious male bashing in The Color Purple is a great moment in literature and a way out of "interpretive indenture...

...Eliot, and that if you look further you discover Jason Epstein of Random House protecting his backlist...

...In the late 1940s the art critic Harold Rosenberg announced that he felt no affinity for the political ideas of his generation...

...Loose Canons is frequently sharp and irreverent as it explores Gates' s favorite issues: minority voices in the West, the intransigence of fogeys and leftists in the universities, the relationship of high-flown literary theory to practical living and progress...

...One of Professor Gates's major works, The Signifying Monkey (Oxford), is an impressive and wide-ranging demonstration of his views...