Walker, Alice | Carole Anne Taylor (essay date winter 1994)
Carole Anne Taylor (essay date winter 1994)
SOURCE: Taylor, Carole Anne. “Humor, Subjectivity, Resistance: The Case of Laughter in The Color Purple.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36, no. 4 (winter 1994): 462-82.
[In the following essay, Taylor evaluates Walker's use of laughter in The Color Purple, asserting that the novel employs laughter as a shared acknowledgment of pain and camaraderie, rather than lighthearted banter.]
They crush and crush your heart; your humor escapes.
—Alice Walker, “Ndebele”
Postmodernism for postmodernism, politics for politics, I'd rather be an ironist than a terrorist.
—Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent
Indeed, irony in the face of actual torture is arguably less worthwhile than terrorism in the face of a text. And we don't, in any event, always get to choose our contexts or our adversaries.
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