African-American Literature

[Profrap]

Jason et. al.,

Whew, the Af-Am article needs tons of work.   Where to begin?  For one, I am a bit puzzled as to why there is an enormous picture of Phyllis Wheatley and so few other pictures -- of anything!

Other thoughts:

* The word "famous" appears at least a dozen times, as though fame were some definite and worthy criterion. Yech!
* The remarks on DuBois are vague and few; much more is needed on his pivotal work.
* Paul Lawrence Dunbar did not write only in dialect, he also wrote in standard Euro-am verse forms.
* Much more needed on James Baldwin
* Why nothing on Richard Wright's later works?
* Nothing on Nella Larson!  This is a major omission
* Nothing about the Norton Anthology of Af-Am literature and its significance
* The latter mini-topics -- Refuting the dominant literary culture, existing on both sides, Balkanization, and Af-Am criticism might better be worked into a single section on Criticism/Critical history, I think.  This would take lots of work.
* Aside from Morrison, there is very little on contemporary Af-Am writers
* There's nothing on hip-hop as poetry

Anyway, as a top-level article, this is a great place to start, but it will take time, I think.  What do the rest of you think?

cheers,

R U S S E L L

[Jason Sanford]

The large image of Wheatley is there b/c is a technical problem with resizing images. Once the programmers fix that issue there won't be a problem. Its also why people aren't importing many images so far--they don't want to do so before the system enables them to resize images to fit articles.

I agree with almost all of your comments. Much more is needed about DuBois and his work, the Norton Anthology (which I plan to add soon), hip hop as poetry, and so on. Of course, since this is an overview article there's a practical limit to what we can include since readers can always go to the main articles on different subjects (such as Wright's article to learn more about his later works). I think it would be good to have subsections on major authors like Douglas, DuBois, Baldwin, Wright, Morrison, and so, with a main article link at the start of their subsection. I also want the Criticism/Critical history to be expanded, although I believe the use of subsections as currently used is something to be retained (as opposed to dumping all the info into one large section).