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Zusatztext Which Sin to Bear? is a brilliantly argued intervention in the ongoing critical debate about the ultimate meaning of the art of Langston Hughes. In the process, David Chinitz sheds invaluable light on a full range of collateral topics of genuine importance to our understanding of African American literature in particular and American literature in general. Informationen zum Autor David E. Chinitz is Professor of English at Loyola University, Chicago. He is the author of T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide and the editor of A Companion to T.S. Eliot. Klappentext Which Sin to Bear? highlights how Langston Hughes struggled with the tension between genuine artistic meaning and commercial concessions throughout his prolific career. Zusammenfassung This book explores Langston Hughes's efforts to mediate problems of identity and ethics he faced as an African-American professional writer and intellectual. Determined on a literary career at a time when no African American had yet been able to live off his or her writing; constrained by poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity; and pressed by the hopes, expectations, and demands of readers and critics of all stripes, Hughes had to rely on his dexterity as a mediator among competing positions in order to preserve his art, his integrity, and his unique status as the literary voice of ordinary African Americans. Issues treated include Hughes's interventions in the shifting definition of "authentic blackness," his work toward a socially effectual discourse of racial protest, his involvement with liberal politics, his ambivalence toward moral compromise even as he engaged in it, and the imprint of all these matters in texts ranging from his poetry and fiction to his essays and newspaper columns. The conflicting facts, varied experiences, divided impulses, and thorny compromises of his own life led Hughes to develop artistically an inclusive vision of the black community that anticipates by several decades what many cultural critics have come to advocate. The book is also the first to analyze Hughes's executive-session testimony before Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was treated as classified information for fifty years before finally being released to the public in 2003. Inhaltsverzeichnis ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ; ABBREVIATIONS ; INTRODUCTION ; 1. BECOMING LANGSTON HUGHES ; 2. PRODUCING AUTHENTIC BLACKNESS ; 3. AUTHENTICITY IN THE BLUES POETRY ; 4. THE ETHICS OF COMPROMISE ; 5. SIMPLE GOES TO WASHINGTON: HUGHES AND THE MCCARTHY COMMITTEE ; 6. "SPEAK TO ME NOW OF COMPROMISE": HUGHES AND THE SPECTER OF BOOKER T. ; APPENDIX A: HUGHES'S SENATE TESTIMONY IN EXECUTIVE SESSION ; APPENDIX B: HUGHES'S PUBLIC TESTIMONY ; BIBLIOGRAPHY ; INDEX ...
