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Zusatztext "Moya's method illustrates her claim that contemporary African American and Latina/o literature rewards close reading within a social context....Moya restores sociality and emotion to the realm of close reading! even as the discipline of literary study has attempted to contrast such features with a rarefied "universal" aesthetic." Informationen zum Autor Paula M. L. Moya is Professor of English and, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. Klappentext This book elaborates the social-psychological concept of schema while championing the literary critical practice of close reading to show how literature reflects, promotes, and contests pervasive sociocultural ideas like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Zusammenfassung This book elaborates the social-psychological concept of schema while championing the literary critical practice of close reading to show how literature reflects, promotes, and contests pervasive sociocultural ideas like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents and Abstracts Introduction: Schemas and Racial Literacy chapter abstract After surveying responses within literary criticism to the contemporary "crisis in the humanities," this chapter lays out the book's theoretical framework. It begins by defining two key terms—"literature" and "close reading"—before arguing for the importance of reconceiving literary criticism's approach to science and the scientific method. Next, it introduces the social psychological concept of "schema," elaborating its significance for how literature works, before considering the relationship between literary evaluation and objectivity. After introducing the concept of racial literacy, the chapter argues that literature is an especially valuable medium for learning about the way race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are materialized in human lives. Because close reading engages our cognitive-affective schemas, there may be no more effective method by which to understand how humans make meaning about our selves and our worlds than through the activity of close reading works of literature. 1 Racism is Not Intellectual: The Dialogic Potential of Multicultural Literature chapter abstract This chapter argues that because emotions are key to the doing of race, a sustained examination of how they figure into human motivation must be central to any attempt to move beyond the ideologies and socioeconomic arrangements that sustain race and racism. In considering how to alter people's emotional horizons, it draws on the work of philosophers Marilyn Friedman and Marilyn Frye, and the literary critic M. M. Bakhtin, to propose two avenues: 1) interracial friendships; and 2) the teaching of multicultural literature. Friendships across difference can be rich contexts for learning about the structural inequalities maintained by race, while literature is a medium through which the social order can be imaginatively examined and reshaped. Both friendships and literature have the potential to move people emotionally by activating people's structures of identification with, and empathy toward, other people. 2 Not One and the Same Thing: The Ethical Relationship of Selves to Others in Toni Morrison's Sula chapter abstract This chapter builds on Chapter 1 to argue that literature remains the most signif...
