“White Man, Listen!”: Richard Wright’s Prophetic Warnings about Angry White Men
Tuesday, 12 February, 2019 @ 05:00 PM - 06:30 PM | Cost:Free
5 p.m., February 12, 2019
Booth Library Conference Room (4440)
A Presentation by Tim Engles
Professor, EIU English Department
How did so many of today’s white American men get so angry? In the 1950s, the most famous black American writer of his time, Richard Wright, offered some answers, and some predictions. Savage Holiday is Wright’s gory, yet insightful novel about a rage-filled white man. Writing from a racial perspective that was necessarily insightful, Wright dramatized in this “white life novel” some of the characteristic feelings and tendencies that are still felt by many of today’s domineering white men—including those displayed by a certain man who recently demanded our nation’s riveted attention.
Tim Engles is the author of White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature (2018), in which he argues that literary fiction’s interior dramas can help us understand and counteract the inner workings of deluded dominance.
Categories: Africana Studies | Alumni | Community | Current Students | Diversity/Inclusive Excellence | English Department | Faculty | Lectures/SeminarsLocation:
1536 4th Street
4440 Conference Room
Charleston, IL 61920
