Reviews for A World of Difference

The average rating for A World of Difference based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-11-02 00:00:00 Mike Hopkins As with most essay collections, it is difficult for me to give a review A World of Difference that feels comprehensive. So, I'll just talk about two of my favorite essays. The book's third essay, "Gender Theory and the Yale School," seems at first to be an attack on the central, and male, figures of the "Yale School' of literary criticism. Johnson argues that these four figures 'efface,' or remove from the foreground, female presence from the works they write about. She goes on to use that effacement to make explicit the gender relationships/views of the critics. Two things are wonderful in this essay. First, Johnson is transparent in her method, in a way that allows the reader to follow along, a partner to the criticism. From a discussion of Harold Bloom: "The essay begins: :"The word meaning goes back to a root that signifies 'opinion' or 'intention,' and is closely related to the word moaning. A poem's meaning is a poem's complaint, its version of Keats' Belle Dame, who looked as if she loved and made sweet moan. Poems instruct us in how they break form to bring about meaning, so as to utter complaint, a moaning intended to be all their own." If the relationship between the reader and the poem is analogous to the relation between the knight-at-arms and the Belle Dame, things are more complicated than they appear. For the encounter between male and female in Keats' poem is a perfectly ambiguous disaster. Rather than a clear "as if," Keats writes: "She looked at me as she did love/ and made sweet moan." Suspicion of the woman is not planted quite so clearly nor quite so early. In changing "as" to "as if," Bloom has removed from the poem the possibility of reading this first mention of the woman's feelings as straight description." Second, near the end of the essay, she turns the criticism on herself - tracing, in past essays, how she'd written women out of her academic life. She finds that she has almost completely avoided female characters, authors, and even fellow critics. Se investigates the few moments in previous essays, where women make appearance, and finds that she has dealt shallowly with them, and "repeated a dramatization of woman as simulacrum, erasure, or silence." AWoD's final essay is perhaps may favorite of the book. It's something of a rambling dialogue about ethics, rhetoric, and abortion. She begins by discussing the poetic technique called apostrophe, in which a poet speaks to an inanimate or dead thing - by extension personifying it. Johnson argues that by speaking to the dead/inanimate, we put on them the ability to hear. By this personification, we make of them a being able to hear, and to be spoken to. Her chief example is a Shelley poem, "Ode to the West Wind," in which the poet cries out for his lost childhood. Shelley mourns the animation that he used to be in him, and that now exists only in the wind, "A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud." Johnson notes that, "If apostrophe is the giving of voice, the throwing of voice, the giving of animation, then a poet using it is always in a sense saying to the addressee, "Be thou me." The essay takes off from there, as Johnson unearths this technique in the poems written by women about their post-abortion emotions. She asks how much of this writing to the aborted is "apostrophe," and how much honestly assumes that there is someone to write to. Just because you have something to say, to clarify, doesn't mean that there is in fact a listener. What is the line between person and personification?

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-04 00:00:00 Peter Moua Chapter 15 - Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston Johnson, a white (radical Jewish) woman, begins the chapter questioning her motives and audience in writing about a black woman's work. She identifies her audience as both black and white individuals. "It was as though I was asking Zora Neale Hurston for answers to questions I did not even know I was unable to formulate. I had a lot to learn, then, from Hurston's way of dealing with multiple agendas and heterogenous implied readers" (172). Johnson's presuppositions include: Hurston lies outside the traditional literary canon. Historical note: exotic primitive was in vogue in late 20's - but not in early 50's. (177) Johnson discusses the "unspoken question inevitably asked by whites of the black artist" that Hurston's essay "How it feels to be colored me" responds to (174?), using strategies in literary criticism to approach several selections of Hurston's writings. Hurston sometimes addresses a presumed white audience, sometimes black (177). In the excerpts quoted, Hurston goes on to describe a loss of identity accompanying a change of location - "I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl" (175) and other thoughts about her race. There is a stunning excerpt on page 176 about Hurston's experience dancing to jazz music, perhaps I'll type it up sometime... Can you erase difference by representing it? Hurston responds to this in the essay "What White Publishers Won't Print" (178). She does not answer it explicitly, and instead deconstructs the question (178). "The revelation to the public of the Negro who is 'just like everybody else' is 'the thing needed to do away with that feeling of difference which inspires fear and which ever expresses itself in dislike.' The thing that prevents the publication of such representations of Negroes is thus said to be the public's indifference to finding out that there is no difference. Difference is a misreading of sameness, but it must be represented in order to be erased. The resistance to finding out the other is the same springs out of the reluctance to admit that the same is the other. If the average man could recognize that the Negro was 'just like him,' he would have to recognize that he was just like the Negro. Difference disliked is identity affirmed (178). The outside is no guarantee of the nature inside. (178)