Street, Text, and Representation in African American Literature

Mattius Rischard is an Assistant Professor of English at Montana State University-Northern. He received his M.A. and PhD at the University of Arizona from the Department of English and Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Programs, specializing in African American literature of the 20th century, with focus on the urban novel and digital/visual culture. He has taught writing and literature for the University of Arizona, Pima Community College, and as a Writing Assessment Specialist for the University of Texas system. He publishes and presents on sociohistorical, aesthetic, and phenomenological methods for reading the problematics of modernity across academic, popular, and marginal representations of urban life.

1. Introduction: Writing the Urban Dwelling

a. Black Literary Authenticity: Humanism versus Pessimism

b. Aims, Questions, and Methodologies

c. The Purpose of this Study

d. The Double-Edged Sword of Urban Sociology

e. Street Literature as Responding to the Urban Sociological Mythos

f. A Note on Interpretation and Value

2. Part I: Street

a. Chapter Synopsis

b. Introduction

c. Preparing to Read the Street

d. Street Literature at the Intersection of Blackness and Urbanization

e. The Street Novel: An Urban Differential in Literature

f. A Close Reading of Two Gen(d)erations in Street Novels: Iceberg Slim

g. A Close Reading of Two Gen(d)erations in Street Novels: Sister Souljah

h. Conclusion

3. Part II: Text

a. Chapter Synopsis

b. Introduction: Four Tropes of the Street-as-Text

c. Temporal Factors Affecting Tropological Semantics

d. Passing: A Comparative Reading of Himes, Beck, and Tyree

e. Peddling: A Comparative Reading of Autobiographical Street Fiction

f. Pandering: A Comparative Reading of Sexual Exchange and Economy

g. Preaching: A Comparative Reading of Demagogues and Messiahs

h. Rinehart’s Face(lessness): (De)constructing the Four Tropes

i. Rinehartism and the Author-Function Problem in Street Literature

j. Defining Rinehartism with Strong Semantics

k. Table 1: The Ontology of Rinehartism

l. Conclusion

4. Part III: Representation

a. Chapter Synopsis

b. Introduction

c. Language Structures the Expression of (Black) Being

d. Implications of Language that Frames Being-in-the-Street

e. The Ethical Work of Street Novels

f. Satirizing Street Publishing: Tyree and Everett

g. Satirizing Street Movements: The Fanonian Ontology of Wideman

h. Satirizing Street Culture: Beatty and Mansbach

i. The Postmodernism of Street Satire

j. Conclusion

5. Conclusion; or, Redefining Street Cultural Production

a. Introduction

b. Music

c. Image

d. Text

e. Praxis

f. Conclusion