Goophered Grapes Pre Ready 1 Essay example - 2710 Words

James Campbell Dr. West Afro Am Lit 7/19/12 Goophered Grapes In the 10 years between the publication of The Goophered Grapevine, Chesnutts first conjure tale, and the composition of The Dumb Witness, the development of segregation culture had even more firmly cemented the popular notions of black and white identifies in the United States. (Robison 61) Charles Chesnutt is credited as a pro-black writer for first being an African-American writer and then presenting the African-American experience for the further humanizing of blacks in the United States. Much of Chesnutt’s work was drawn from his own experience as a fair-skinned black person as revealed by Mary Zeigler in her article, History And Background Of The Charles W. Chesnutt†¦show more content†¦Also, there are many black writers that wrote very empowering pieces that did succeed at presenting and demonstrating the black experience like Toni Morrison, Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes. But for those that do subscribe to the idea that being able to speak standard American English makes a person ‘better’, like many Americans, black and white did at that time and still do, by showing the contrast of Chesnutts extremely harsh dialect of Julius, which â€Å"indulges a scholarly predilection for the obscure or exotic†, to that of the narrator fu rther enforces and encourages that negative social construct (Bodie). Speaking of Americans that might have subscribed to this idea, let’s take a moment to consider who would be reading this text. â€Å"The Atlantic Monthly† is a Bostonian publication that centered on politics, literature, science and the arts. While these topics are not reserved for our society’s elite so much these days, it was much more so back then and the creators of the magazine definitely thought of themselves as part of our nation’s cultural elite. Even to this day, at least some of the staff at â€Å"The Atlantic† feel this way. Managing editor, Cullen Murphy gave a presentation and presented its founders like this; At a moment in our history when New England was Americas literary Olympus, the men gathered that afternoon could be said to occupy the summit. They included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,