TY - BOOK ID - 77871986 TI - Signs and cities PY - 2003 SN - 1281125504 9786611125509 0226167283 9780226167282 9780226167268 0226167267 9780226167275 0226167275 9781281125507 PB - Chicago University of Chicago Press DB - UniCat KW - American literature KW - Postmodernism (Literature) KW - African Americans KW - City and town life in literature. KW - African Americans in literature. KW - Afro-Americans in literature KW - Negroes in literature KW - African American intellectuals KW - African American authors KW - History and criticism. KW - Intellectual life. KW - African Americans in literature KW - City and town life in literature KW - English literature KW - Agrarians (Group of writers) KW - Intellectual life KW - African American authors&delete& KW - History and criticism KW - Thematology KW - anno 1900-1999 KW - african-american, literature, black, blackness, race, racism, subjectivity, postmodernism, print literacy, disillusionment, disenchantment, nonfiction, john edgar wideman, sapphire, ishmael reed, gloria naylor, toni morrison, samuel delany, octavia butler, book, reading, writing, oral storytelling, folk narrative, expression, urban, community, voyeurism, spectacle, information age, mediation, american south, heritage, belonging. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77871986 AB - Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970's, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression. ER -