Lexington Books
Pages: 168
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-0-7391-4494-7 • Hardback • July 2012 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
978-0-7391-9778-3 • Paperback • June 2014 • $59.99 • (£46.00)
James B. Haile, III is McAnulty College scholar-in-residence at Duquesne University.
Introduction: Richard Wright and Philosophy
James B. Haile, III
Part I. Richard Wright’s Literary Imagination
Chapter 1: Bigger–Cross Damon: Wright’s Existential Challenge
Lewis R. Gordon
Chapter 2: Black Boy: Phenomenology and the Existential Novel
James B. Haile, III
Chapter 3: Experiencing Existentialism through Theme and Tone: Kierkegaard and Richard Wright
Desirèe H. Melton
Part II. Richard Wright’s Philosophical Imagination
Chapter 4: Fear, Trembling and Transcendence in the Everyday of Richard Wright: A Quare Reading
Victor Anderson
Chapter 5: Specularity as a Mode of Knowledge and Agency in Richard Wright’s Work
Abdul R. Janmohamed
Part III. Richard Wright Today
Chapter 6: “The Uses and Hazards of Expatriation”: Richard Wright’s Cosmopolitanism in Process
Alexa Weik
Chapter 7: On Richard Wright and Our Contemporary Situation
Jerry W. Ward
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 in 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, Haile and his cohort 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 shown to unambiguously challenge, if not ultimately up-end, these traditions. Indeed, Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright deftly demonstrates that Wright not only wrote existential-phenomenology-informed fiction, but that his prose often-eerily mirrored the oppression, alienation, tragicomic, absurd, and angst-filled realities of African American life, culture, and struggle. Indeed, in their own unique and awe-inspiring ways, each contributor to this volume deploys Wright’s discourse to contest the longstanding lovelessness, horrifying hopelessness, and tormenting meaninglessness that has historically and, sad to say, currently continues to characterize the African American experience. From start to finish this is a fascinating philosophical tour de force that will be welcomed by scholars and students of philosophy, literature, sociology, political science, and African American Studies.
— Reiland Rabaka