LITERARY THEORY IN ACTION: TEN SERIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS

 1. Literary Theory in Action

Lois Tyson’s exceptionally candid, clear and attractively written Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide {1} shows how literary theories can variously illuminate the same work of fiction, here F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The exercise illustrates the fascinating scope of literary theory today, and makes its practical consequences strikingly plain. I shall briefly summarize those findings in the present chapter, both to show the fecundity of literary theory, and to illustrate the problems it poses to traditional concepts like truth and fidelity to experience. In the interests of space, I don’t generally elaborate the theories {2} (which are anyway considered later in this blog — except black American literature) but readers should know that they are presented in considerable detail in Tyson’s book, making the book a very accessible introduction to literary theory.

 LITERARY THEORY IN ACTION: TEN SERIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS

2.1.The Great Gatsby 

Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is well known, but a brief summary is this: {3} 

The Great Gatsby is set during the roaring twenties, and tells the story of one man's pursuit of the American Dream. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is an upper-class American who moves from the West to New York to try his luck as a bond trader. He meets his wealthy neighbor named Jay Gatsby, and becomes involved in Gatsby's plan to rekindle a lost love with a woman named Daisy Buchanan, who happens to be Nick's cousin. 

Jay Gatsby, is involved in illegal activities, but throws lavish parties, hoping thereby to meet the long lost Daisy. Meanwhile, however, Daisy's husband, Tom, is carrying on an affair with a garage owner's wife; a woman named Myrtle Wilson. Driving home from New York, Daisy unknowingly runs over and kills Myrtle while driving Gatsby's car. Griefstricken, Myrtle's husband, George Wilson, tries to find out who was responsible, and is directed by Tom to Gatsby's house, where George shoots and kills Gatsby, leaving only Nick to appreciate the ironies and moral consequences of the affair. 

2.2. Psychoanalytic Criticism

The Great Gatsby is not the great American love story supposed by its fans, but a sombre account of dysfunctional loves. Through fear of intimacy, Tom is a serial philanderer. Daisy was not in love with Tom when she married him, but becomes so as she discovers Tom’s infidelities, suggesting that Daisy too fears commitment and intimacy. Both are emotionally insecure, Tom when he flaunts Myrtle in fashionable restaurants, and Daisy when she takes up with Jay. Daisy even flirts with Nick at the Buchanans’ party on Long Island, where Jordan Baker appears, a childhood friend to whom Daisy seems not particularly close. Myrtle married George because he was a step up the social ladder, and sees Tom in the same light. For his part, Tom has no real interest in his mistress’s life. Nick is drawn to Jordan because of her sporty image and cool independence, but ends the affair when he is most needed, after Myrtle’s death, a pattern that echoes past relationships. Even the central romance, of Daisy with Jay, is based on false understandings, and her feelings evaporate when she learns that Jay has not come from the ‘right side of the tracks’.

Daisy would be the trophy wife for someone who came from ‘shiftless and unsuccessful farm people’. Far from being life’s Holy Grail, the affair was a psychological defence against life’s larger issues, and it’s not coincidence that Jay is killed by Tom as surely as Daisy kills Myrtle, and as carelessly: Daisy doesn’t intervene to save her lover from the hit-andrun accusation, which indeed leads to his death. 

Psychoanalytic theories of denial and displacement peel off the superficial glamour to reveal destructive tendencies and loneliness in all members of the cast ― which perhaps accounts for the uncertain response to the novel in poor early sales and reservations among critics. (19) (22) (26)

2.3. Marxist Criticism 

Though film makers have been drawn to the lavish social settings and material extravagance of the book, The Great Gatsby is in fact a savage indictment of moral decay. Everything can be traded in the roaring twenties, as it was by Jay Gatsby with his bootlegging friends and worthless bonds. Tom Buchanan buys Daisy for her youth, beauty and wealth, celebrating the engagement with the $350,000 string of pearls, but still continues his affairs with less demanding working-class women. Under the capitalist ideology, ‘you are what you own’, and Tom takes great pleasure in showing off his house, luxury cars and the conspicuous consumption of his life style. But though he went to Yale (as Fitzgerald went to Princeton) he was never really ‘old money’ and, by compensation, is often rude and abusive to those he sees as commodities that can be manipulated at will. He slyly suggests to Myrtle that he might marry her one day, and has no compunction in directing the murderous George Wilson to Gatsby’s house. 

Nor are Myrtle and Daisy any more starry-eyed towards Tom. Indeed all the characters have their own mercenary agendas, and are apt to ‘smash up things’ when things go wrong and ‘retreat back into their money.’ Only George and Myrtle live in the ‘valley of ashes’, that grim reality behind the American dream, which they will never leave. Unrepentant and uncaring, the Buchanans move on with their lives. Nick 26 in the end rejects Jordan, and returns west, free of responsibilities, to the ‘snobbishness’ of family and local connections. Gatsby, the self-made millionaire, is even more a fabrication, designed to impress Daisy, and callously removed by her husband.

But if The Great Gatsby is a critique of capitalism, it is a subtle one. Myrtle and George are not attractive members of the working class, simple and hardworking, but exploiters of the system. Nick is seduced by Jay’s generosity and strange innocence to overlook his criminal activities. Fitzgerald’s lush language portrays Jay’s and even the Buchanan’s world in loving detail. (41)

2.3. Feminist Views 

The roaring twenties emancipated women considerably: they had the vote, could dress more casually, attend bars and nightclubs as they pleased, and follow their own vocations in employment. Daisy, Myrtle and Jordan are all versions of this new woman, but many other party creatures flit through Fitzgerald’s pages, where they are commonly described as shallow, rowdy and exhibitionist. Even Nick, the only character to have a moral conscience, and who acts as the reliable narrator, can be chauvanistic: ‘dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply,’ he remarks. The only two minor women characters described in some detail, Mrs. McKee and Myrtle’s sister Catherine, are both unattractive: shrill and languid in the first case, and showily vulgar in the second. Why is this? And why are the Daisy, Myrtle and Jordan so determined not to be role models as they drink, smoke, party and are unfaithful or (Jordan) engage in premarital sex?  

Fitzgerald’s views are clearly ambivalent. Daisy comes over as a spoiled brat, who doesn’t bother to stop and see who she has injured with her drunk driving, or intervene when Jay will take the blame for her actions. She doesn’t merit the adoration Jay lavishes on her, and has no further interest in him once his socio-economic class is revealed. Jordan is a liar and cheat, jauntily masculine, and frankly doesn’t care if her driving injures the lower orders. Myrtle is middle-aged, fat, loud and obnoxiously affected. Worse, she enjoys cheating on the husband who adores her. Why has Fitzgerald assembled such an unlovely cast, and why do they have to be so summarily punished? Daisy goes back to a loveless marriage. Jordan gets dumped by Nick. Myrtle is more woman than George can handle, but first her nose is broken by Tom for mentioning Daisy in the same breath, and then she is run down and killed by the same Daisy. Sexual independence was not acceptable in women, and certainly not the sexual aggressiveness that men bragged about. (43) 

2.4. The New Criticism 

Though The New Criticism has not been academically interesting for fifty years, it has left a lasting mark on literary craft and classroom teaching. Close reading will accept many of the interpretations we have noted for The Great Gatsby, but the most striking finding is the beauty of description, of things seen with great freshness though surrounded by moral indifference or decay. With that innocence comes an unfulfilled longing for a better world, which has always been part of the human condition, and for which Fitzgerald’s novel remains perennially attractive. It is a young man’s novel set in a new America, or one striving to be new. There are three aspects of Fitzgerald’s imagery: nostalgia for a lost past, dreams of a future fulfillment, and an undefined longing that has no specific goal. 

Daisy and Jordan’s past in Louisville is crisply touched in: golf courses, white dresses and handsome young officers. Nick remembers his Midwest childhood, its Christmases, expanses of clean snow, and train rides back from college. Jay remembers Daisy’s departure, and even Tom sees life as an unrecoverable football game. Lost youth, lost love, lost enchantment with the American continent itself — throughout the novel there is a larger world of hope and disappointment that is too detailed to be described here. Both the ‘valley of ashes’ and Port Roosevelt in Nick’s ride into town speak of future riches, enjoyment and change. Such imagery, its refinements and its contrasts, are woven into the fabric and give the novel an invigorating vitality amidst the tawdry reality that make up its protagonists’ lives.

The same air of unfulfilled longing pervades the imposing residence that is Jay’s house, and it faces the bay, on far side of which lives Daisy. The careless behaviour of the party guests is contrasted with the haunting beauty of the setting, Jay’s imagining Daisy’s first kiss is contrasted with Daisy and Tom’s violent quarrels, the young clerks’ solitary dinners is contrasted with the poignant splendour of another day departing . . and so on. Many pages of details would be needed to prove the point, but it is this quality that has kept the novel alive when the roaring twenties disappeared into the great depression. Unlike other forms of literary theory, The New Criticism requires no leap of faith or clever invention, but its apparent straight-forwardness does overlook the varied motives of readers. 

2.5. Reader Response Criticism 

Unlike the New Criticism, where informed, intelligent and honest readers could be expected to come to much the same evaluations of a piece of literature, the focus in reader response criticism is on the readers’ responses, the differing values and tacit understandings every individual brings to a reading. The text is not inert, moreover, but varies, according to school of thought, from something lightly guiding readers to something wholly constructed by them. {4} (26)

Similar is the way guests build their picture of Gatsby, recounting the tittle-tattle and wild rumours about the host they never meet. Gatsby was a German spy; he murdered a man; he was a rich imposter. Tom Buchanan employs a private detective to find out the damaging truth, but the guests enjoy themselves with shocking speculations. All characters have their motives. Daisy naturally wants to see Gatsby as the knight in shining armour. For Wolfsheim, Gatsby is a man of fine breeding whose contacts he can put to good use. George Wilson wants Gatsby to be the man who murdered his wife, which will justify a need for revenge. Even Nick interprets Gatsby through the lens of his own projections, as someone he doesn’t like, does like, is fraudulent, could teach him something about bond trading.

On actually meeting him, Nick observes: ‘It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it . . . precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished — and I was looking at an elegant rough-neck . . . whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.’ 

That ambiguity persists on leaving the party. ’A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who stood on the porch, his hand held up in a formal gesture of farewell.’  

So Nick constructs his picture of Gatsby, first discounting the seeming falsehoods about an Oxford education, jewel and painting collecting, big game hunting, and then being pulled up short by being shown a war medal, Oxford snaps and the deference by a police officer. That picture evolves in the various scenes and plot developments through the novel, shifting in response to Nick’s approval and non-approval, and so in the puzzled gaze of the reader. Gatsby become the hero but also the crook who will do anything to get what he wants — both at the same time, but in the end justifying Nick’s assessment as ‘worth the whole damn bunch put together’. As with Nick, who has yet to find his way in life, and for whom Gatsby acts as knight errant, we also project our hopes and contradictions into the imagined lives of a world now closed to all but the very rich. (45.2) 

2.6. Structuralist Criticism 

Many structures are only too apparent in The Great Gatsby: the contrasts between the present and the past, between material affluence and moral shabbiness, between current wealth and poverty (the Buchanan’s world versus the Wilsons’ life in the ‘valley of ashes’), and between appearance and reality (Jay’s parties versus his illegal activities, Tom’s society marriage versus his sordid philanderings), and so on. But the larger structure can be summarized by three verbs: to seek, to find and to lose.

Jay seeks, finds and loses Daisy twice in the novel, first in his early impoverished days as Lieutenant Jay Gatsby and eventually as the self-made millionaire. Daisy sought emotional security, apparently found it in Tom Buchanan, only to lose it in a loveless marriage. Tom sought ego gratification as a college football star but lost it on graduation, for which his continual affairs are no lasting 31 substitute. Myrtle Wilson seeks escape from boredom and poverty with George, finds it with Tom Buchanan, and loses it to Daisy’s intoxicated driving. George has dreams of economic security, just as Jordan looks for social security in the winning putt, which continually eludes her. McKee is not successful as a photographer, and Catharine seems to be permanently disappointed in her social forays. Gatsby’s party guests are continually wandering on to new extravagances. 

Jay Gatsby is emblematic of the American dream, not only the rags to riches story but the lost paradise that he concocts with an Oxford background and vague family riches. Some of that adventure is real: he was promoted from lowly lieutenant to decorate major in the war. He gained a military scholarship to Oxford. He sailed three times round the world on Cody’s yacht. With that superficial polish he rose rapidly through Wolfsheim’s organization to a wealth exceeding Buchanan’s. But the wealth is acquired through bootlegging and illegal bond-trading, and patina of assured breeding is never convincing, to himself or Nick Carraway. Jay may well be the mythic hero destined to give his life for spiritual revival of his people, and indeed in Nick’s eyes remains the one character true to a worthwhile dream, but there is no revival, no rebirth of innocence. Gatsby, Myrtle and George leave this world. Nick goes back home. Worldly success belongs to the Buchanans and Wolfsheims, to the brutal and seedy aspects of American life.

The Great Gatsby supports many different views. Critics indeed have varied in their judgement of Gatsby, but some do see him as the ‘representative American hero’, the romantic who ‘transcends the limiting glamor of the Jazz Age’. Others have noted not only Tom’s sexist and racist expressions, but Nick’s too, his unsympathetic view of the 32 less well-off, and his escapist character. He came back restless from WWI to his family roots, went east to escape a woman he didn’t wish to marry, spent a summer trying, unsuccessfully, to become a bond-trader in New York, and will go back to his home town with a darker and more despairing view of human nature. It was an outlook common to inter-war writers, but is certainly not to be envied. (6) 

2.7. Deconstructive Criticism 

Just as deconstruction undermines the truth of any statement or belief system, so the characters in The Great Gatsby find their hopes and observations undermined by troubling inconsistencies. {6} Society, the goal of upwardly mobile Americans, is not peopled by edifying and worthy characters but more by the irremediably grasping, vulgar and selfish. The Buchanans exhibit none of the comfortably-off and respectable family life that Nick knew when growing up in Minnesota, or that Daisy and Jordan enjoyed in young womanhood. The middle and working classes, the Catherine’s, the Myrtles and McKee’s of this world, are only concerned to ape their richer cousins, avid for social status and empty diversions. The Blacks whom Nicks sees on his way to New York are no better but roll their eyes in ‘haughty rivalry’ at Jay’s chauffeured luxury car. George Wilson and his neighbors in the ‘valley of ashes’ are the only characters that seem free of this empty aspiration, but they are too busy just surviving, and even George in selling the car Tom promises hopes to escape to modest prosperity. 

Jay himself ‘breaks like glass against Tom’s hard malice’. Nick has soon had enough. He arrived full of innocent hopes: ‘the city seen from Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty of the world’. He decamps in the autumn of the same year, returning to dwellings that are ‘still called through decades by a family name’ from New York’s bonfire of vanities, ‘when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line.’ 

The clean and bracing Minnesota sky that was to prepare Nick for manhood instead deliver him to the sullen and overhanging eastern prospects, to images of human alienation, grotesque houses, and drunken women with mislaid names delivered to the wrong address. The very concept of innocence exposes him to danger, and George Wilson, the only character who trusts everyone, has no personality at all but ‘stared at the cars and people that passed along the road. When anyone spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable and colorless way.’ His was a blameless life, but he had no friends, and the novel suggests that the decadence of New York is infinitely more to be preferred than uneventful innocence. (8) 

2.8 New Historical and Cultural Criticism

We have looked at The Great Gatsby through various lenses of literary theory, but the views are not distinct but somewhat overlapping, apt to coalesce into vague generalities. Marxist oppression merges with feminist views. Deconstructive disappointments merge with psychoanalytic hints of personal shortcomings and loss. Identities thus depend on the viewer. Power is also diffused through societies in changing ways. No account can be final, therefore, or all-embracing. Fact and fiction are necessarily interwoven in any human world. Even standard histories, once seen as compilations of incontrovertible facts, are also not fully objective, not wholly representative of their contemporary world-views, and not proof that events were indeed strictly linear, progressive or causally linked. Like novels, historical studies will be ‘thick’ with fact and interpretation, and only be in some ways true, or persuasive up to certain point. 

Literary texts are cultural artifacts that tell us something about the interplay of discourses, the web of social meanings, operating in the time and place where they were written. {7} 

As the title indicates, the social context for The Great Gatsby is the self-made man, the folk hero of early 20th century American life. Self-men men dominated the oil, steel and even the banking industries. Some, like Carnegie, wrote selfhelp manuals where they emphasized the personal qualities that had brought them success, usually hard work, sobriety, clear objectives and risk-taking, i.e. recognizing opportunities when they presented themselves. Leaving the parental fold early also helped, making them more independent and selfdirected. Boys from impoverished backgrounds even had advantages over wealthier cousins: they were inured to hard work earlier, and less likely to waste time and money on acquiring fine clothes and manners. Most importantly, they had not been contaminated with false values by a college education. Social polish could be acquired later, by the exercises the manuals laid out.

To the self-made class clearly belonged Jay Gatsby: indeed he was still following the daily self-improvement exercises when Nick meets him, and declares later that he had earned Daisy, unlike Tom Buchanan whose love ‘was strictly personal’, i.e. something simply purchased as he bought everything else with his inherited wealth. Unfortunately, of course, the biographies of self-made men were not wholly reliable. The school of hard knocks had not necessarily made them loveable human beings, and success stories papered over questionable dealings and business practices. So it was with Gatsby and his dubious associates, people who ‘fixed’ financial events and sold worthless bonds to 35 trusting illiterates. Even the history of the Civil War and the ‘manifest destiny of the north’, which gave a raison d’etre to men like Jay Gatsby was somewhat simplified if not downright sentimental. What galvanizes a novel’s characters may not always be true.

In reading a literary work, the new cultural criticism will therefore ask such political questions as: what models of behaviour are being enforced? How would they be seen by readers? Are there wide differences between obvious and implicit values? On what social understandings does the work depend, and are they still valid? What possible freedoms of thought are being constrained or repressed? What are the larger social settings? (18) 

2.9. Lesbian, Gay and Queer Criticism

LBGTQ people probably make up 10% of the population, but are still stigmatized, and their insights unacknowledged in writers. Outwardly, The Great Gatsby is about heterosexual loves, abundantly so, but the setting is more ambiguous. It’s possible to wonder if Nick Carroway is not a closeted homosexual. He accepts the louche atmosphere of Jay’s parties, without taking advantage of what’s on offer, and even facilitates the adulterous triangles that make up the affairs of Jay and Daisy, and of Tom and Myrtle. He sees nothing odd in Mr. McKee’s feminine passivity, even when the man lies in bed in nothing but his underclothes, and he happily accepts McKee’s invitation to lunch. Jay clearly enjoys his impeccable grooming and sports a wardrobe rich in pinks and purples, matters Nick comments favourably on. Tom is unnecessarily and aggressively heterosexual as though over-compensating for contrary inclinations and much of the décor of Jay’s house is extravagantly feminine. 

Nick also likes looking at the ‘hard, jaunty body’ of Jordan, who is described as a ‘slender, small-breasted girl with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her shoulders back like a young cadet’. She makes her living in the male world of golf, and ‘instinctively avoided clever shrewd men . . because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible.’ And though Nick constantly stresses (perhaps too constantly) that he is one of the few honest people he has met, it is Jordan who disabuses him by remarking ‘’Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? . . . I thought it was your secret pride.’ 

All these are small matters hinted at but not explained by the novel, which thereby suggests the categories of sexual inclination and behaviour are not fixed for Fitzgerald, who was indeed fascinated by transgressive sexual behaviour. If the three affairs portrayed by The Great Gatsby are not unsatisfactory enough by conventional standards, there is the troubling afterthought they may screen even less acceptable behaviour. {8}

2.10. African American Criticism 

Harlem is next door to Manhattan and would have been frequented for its jazz nightclubs and freely flowing liquor stores by members of the Buchanan set, but The Great Gatsby makes no mention of the place. Racist remarks are personified by Tom, moreover, with his dark references to alarmist accounts of a threatened white race, but there is nothing in the novel about the black culture that featured so prominently in leading magazines and newspapers of the period. In fact, Fitzgerald knew black celebrities in New York 37 and Paris very well, but the novel deals only with occasional stereotypes, a limousine occupied by ‘two bucks and a girl’, for example. Where Blacks do appear in Fitzgerald’s works, they are referred to in disparaging terms and generally introduced for comic effect. Why? Was black culture something Fitzgerald feared would overtake his own achievements? {9}

2.11. Concluding Remarks 

Given Lois Tyson’s exceptionally clear and sensible account, why does literary theory need the mountains of erudite and rarified theory common in other academic accounts? Because Tyson’s account, though much to be applauded for clarity, is also, unfortunately, rather limited. Matters are not so clear-cut and self-evident when the principles of literary theory are pursued in depth, as later sections of this book will demonstrate. It is not simply that theory is fascinating; always questioning neither our earlier assumptions, nor even that it is also secondary, perhaps parasitical on the creative ability needed to write works of art. {10} Literary theory has in fact its own serious philosophical problems, as further reading will show. For the present, we might note that literary theory as presently conceived has little to say on art as art, and therefore fails to illuminate literature in one crucial aspect. Nothing is said by Tyson about the literary quality of Fitzgerald’s writing, which is clearly of a high order if it can remain a popular choice among ordinary readers for close on a century now.

References 

1. Most material is taken from. Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Routledge, 2014. 

2. Chapters 9-11 of George Watson's The Literary Critics (1986) and Chapter 2 of Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature (1990). 4. Christopher Norris's Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. (1982), J. Sturrock's Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Straus to Derrida. (1984), Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1983), Chapter 8 of Bernard Bergonzi's Exploding English (1990), Chapter 11 of George Watson's The Literary Critics (1986), J.G. Merquior's From Prague to Paris (1986), pp. 29-33 of John Passmore's Recent Philosophers (1985), Roger Scruton's Modern Philosophy (1996), Raman Seldon's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1985), and the works listed on page 65 of Wendell Harris's Literary Meaning (1996). 

3. Softschools writers’ The Great Gatsby. 

https://www.softschools.com/literature/summary/the_great_gatsby/ (2020). 

4. Gerard Gennette’s Narrative Discourse (1989) and A.J. Greimas’s On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (1970). 

5. Ian Gregson's Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement (1996), Lionel Trilling’s F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Liberal Imagination (1950), Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978), Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (1980), David Bleich’s Subjective Criticism (1978). 

6. Nicholas Royle’s Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000), Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (2007), Christopher Norris’ Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (2002), and Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (2002). 

7. John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), Stephen Greenblat’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011), Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblat’s Practicing New Historicism (2000). 

8. Henry Abelove et al. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), Joseph Bristow’s Sexuality (2011), Steven Sideman’s The Social Construction of Sexuality (2010), Donald Hall and Annamarie Jagose’s The Routledge Queer’s Reader (2013), Emmanuel Nelson’s (ed) Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color (1993). 

9. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001), Badia Ahad’s Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture (2010), Babacar Camara’s Marxist Theory, Black/African Specificities, and Racism (2008) and David Ikard’s Breaking the Silence: Towards a Black Male Feminist Criticism (2007). 

10. Ian Gregson's Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement (1996).