Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Five

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-113
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Part 6 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

The introduction to Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Six

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-133
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Part 6 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Four

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Part 4 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Three

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Part 3 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Two

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Part 2 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter One

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Part 1 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-137
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Concluding thoughts of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

scholarly journals The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-663
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Critical Model

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

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