Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wideman, John Edgar - James Robert Saunders (essay date December 1992)

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James Robert Saunders (essay date December 1992)

SOURCE: "Exorcizing the Demons: John Edgar Wideman's Literary Response," in Hollins Critic, Vol. XXIX, No. 5, December, 1992, pp. 1-10.

[Saunders is a professor of English at Purdue University and critic. In the following essay, he surveys Wideman's works, delineating the author's response to the inherent dualities of sociology, psychology, and image faced by African Americans.]

In his socio-literary classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois characterized African-Americans as being in possession of a double-consciousness in which "one ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." The notion is a persistent one in the annals of African-American literature. James Weldon Johnson through his narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), makes the further...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. James W. Coleman (essay date March 1985)
   2. Jacqueline Berben (essay date Fall 1985)
   3. John Bennion (essay date Spring/Summer 1986)
   4. Gary Dretzka (review date 29 November 1987)
   5. Harold Jaffe (review date March-April 1988)
   6. Matthew Wilson (essay date March 1990)
   7. John Edgar Wideman with Charles H. Rowell (interview date Winter 1990)
   8. Jacqueline Berben (essay date April-June 1991)
   9. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy (essay date Fall 1991)
   10. Jan Clausen (essay date Spring 1992)
   11. Michael Gorra (review date June 14 1992)
   12. Sven Birkerts (review date 13 and 20 July 1992)
   13. John Edgar Wideman with Jessica L. Lustig (interview date Fall 1992)
   14. James Robert Saunders (essay date December 1992)
   15. Mel Watkins (review date 13 November 1994)
   16. Mark Shechner (review date March/April 1995)
   17. Sanford Pinsker (review date Spring 1995)
   18. Paul West (review date 29 September 1996)
   19. Gene Seymour (review date 28 October 1996)
   20. Sven Birkerts (review date 3 November 1996)
   21. Joyce Carol Oates (review date 27 March 1997)
   22. Michael Wood (review date 27 November 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright