Barack Obama's Literary Legacy

President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in which he composed them, social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands "literary" to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful, artful writing brings to the surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form, thereby revealing what Edward W. Said famously defined as the "worldliness" of the literary object. In the case of President Obama's writings, and Dreams from My Father in particular, those relationships are evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes and historical narratives. By positioning the "literary" at this vantage, at the point where writing and the world converge, the volume's contributors assert the indispensable, and urgent, import of understanding the President not only in political terms, but, more importantly, in literary terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.

Autorentext

Richard Purcell is Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. He is the author of Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture.

Henry Veggian is a Lecturer of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He is the author of Understanding Don DeLillo.

Inhalt

Introduction; Richard Purcell and Henry Veggian

1. Genre Instability and SelfInvention in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father; Stephanie Li
2. "Frankly Speaking": Frank Marshall Davis, The Black Chicago Renaissance, and Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father; John Lowney
3. Walking on Figs: Obama as Young Writer in Literary Los Angeles; James Fitzmaurice
4. "A Reach Across the Void": Reconstructing the African Family in Barack Obama and Aminatta Forna; David Borman
5. Barack Obama's Postironic Bildungsroman; Lee Konstantinou
6. Niebuhrian Realism in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope; Roberto Sirvent and Neil Baker
7. Barack Obama's Orphic Mysteries; Donald E. Pease