Alice Walker, New Edition (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

232 Pages·2007·1.53 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
Alice Walker
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker—New Edition
Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Alice Walker / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern criticial views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9611-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7910-9611-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Walker, Alice, 1944- —Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold.
PS3525.I5156Z5145 2007
812’.52—dc22 2006102701
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Alice Walker’s Men: Profi les
in the Quest for Love and Personal Values 5
Louis H. Pratt
“All Saints Should Walk Away”:
The Mystical Pilgrimage of Meridian 19
Joseph A. Brown
Alice Walker: The
Achievement of the Short Fiction 33
Alice Hall Petry
Coming to Voice in Alice
Walker’s Meridian: Speaking Out for the Revolution 51
Lynn Pifer
Alice Walker’s Redemptive Art 69
Felipe Smith
Alice Walker’s Vision of the
South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland 89
Robert James Butler
vi Contents
Alice Walker: In Praise of Maternal Heritage 101
Gail Keating
Alice Walker’s The Temple
of My Familiar as a Pastiche 115
Bonnie Braendlin
Visual Marker’s: Art and Mass
Media in Alice Walker’s Meridian 133
Deborah E. Barker
Teaching Alice Walker’s “Everyday
Use”: Employing Race, Class, and Gender 155
Marcia Noe
Telling a Critical Story: Alice
Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 169
Laurie McMillan
Reanimating the Trope of the Talking
Book in Alice Walker’s “Strong Horse Tea” 187
Deborah Anne Hooker
Alice Walker Chronology 207
Contributors 209
Bibliography 211
Acknowledgements 215
Index 217
Editor’s Note
My Introduction amiably questions Walker’s firm assumption that her
books do not engage in any contest with Hurston’s.
Linda Selzer reasonably examines the issues of race and domesticity
in Th e Color Purple, after which Marcia Noe and Michael Jaynes zealously
expound the everyday, ideological use of Walker’s writing.
Meridian, Walker’s most ambitious novel, is related by Deborah A.
Baker to the prevalence of visual dominance in our mass media, while Bonnie
Braendlin defends the experimental Th e Temple of My Familiar, a New Age
pastiche.
Gail Keating exalts Walker as a high priestess of black maternalism,
after which Robert James Butler more temperately considers Th e Th ird Life of
Grange Copeland.
For Felipe Smith, Walker is a redeemer, while Lynn Pifer joins the
chorus of hosannas for Meridian.
Walker’s prowess as short story writer is recognized by Alice Hall Petry,
after which Louis H. Pratt fi nds Walker’s male characters to be generally a
motley ensemble of sexism and racism.
Mystical messiahship is granted to Meridian by Joseph A. Brown, S. J.
while Deborah Anne Hooker acclaims Walker as an ecocritic.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
Alice Walker (– )
I
A contemporary writer who calls herself “author and medium” is by no
means idiosyncratic, and Alice Walker certainly seems to me a wholly
representative writer of and for our current era. The success of The Color
Purple is deserved; Walker’s sensibility is very close to the Spirit of the Age.
Rather than seek to analyze verse and fictional prose that is of a kind I am
not yet competent to judge, or a speculative essay such as “In Search of Our
Mothers’ Gardens” which eludes me, I will center here upon Walker’s medi-
tations upon her acknowledged precursor, Zora Neale Hurston. There is no
book more important to me than this one,” Walker wrote of Hurston’s mas-
terwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Perhaps the only literary enthusiasm
I share with Walker is my own deep esteem for that admirable narrative,
about which I have written elsewhere.
Walker associated her feeling for Hurston with her similar veneration
for famous black women singers, Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. Th at
association is a moving trope or defense, since Hurston, like Walker, was a
writer and not a vocalist. Here is another tribute by Walker to Hurston:
We live in a society, as blacks, women, and artists, whose contests
we do not design and with whose insistence on ranking us we are
permanently at war. To know that second place, in such a society,
has often required more work and innate genius than first, a lon-
ger, grimmer struggle over greater odds that first—and to be able
to fling your scarf about dramatically while you demonstrate that
1