Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction, and DramaRita Dove (b. 1952) was elected Poet Laureate--the first ever African-American to hold the position--in 1993, in recognition of work that combines racially sensitive observation with searing and immediate personal experience. She is best known for her substantial body of poetry, although she has also been recognized for her many accomplishments in drama and fiction, written in both German and English. Crossing Color, written by a well-known Americanist in the European community, is the first full-length critical study offering a comprehensive biographic and literary portrait of Rita Dove and her work. |
Contents
| 3 | |
1 Rita Doves MacroPoetics of Space | 23 |
2 Rita Doves MicroPoetics of Space | 46 |
3 Movements of a Marriage Or Looking Awry at US History | 95 |
Through the Ivory Gate | 110 |
5 Myths Remakes | 122 |
On the Bus with Rosa Parks | 140 |
Conclusions | 163 |
In Conversation with Rita Dove | 167 |
Notes | 179 |
Works Cited | 201 |
Index | 223 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic African African-American Afro-American Akron Amalia American artistic Augustus Aunt Bachelard Bildungsroman Black Arts Movement blue boundaries Bus with Rosa chapter consciousness critical Crossing Color cultural space Darker Face death Demeter Derek Walcott dreams Earth enspacements experience feel female fiction Fifth Sunday Fred Viebahn freedom gender German girl Greek Gwendolyn Brooks Henry Louis Gates human identity imagination Ivory Gate language literary literature lives lyrical male Medusa memory Mother Love move myth narrative National neighborhood pain past Persephone play poem poet poet's Poetics of Space poetry political puppet race racial Rasha Rita Dove Rita Dove's Rosa Parks sense slave sonnet spatial stanza story symbol things Thomas and Beulah Thomas's tion Toni Morrison Trans transcultural ture turns University Press Vendler Virginia voice W. E. B. Du Bois wings woman writing Yellow House York
Popular passages
Page 189 - Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Page 186 - In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.
Page 25 - A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.
Page 159 - SCHWARZE Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts wir trinken und trinken wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt...
Page 81 - It is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nevertheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror.
Page 39 - The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.
Page 42 - A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.
Page ix - No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental.
Page 47 - The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.