SOURCE: Weixlmann, Joe. “African American Deconstruction of the Novel in the Work of Ishmael Reed and Clarence Major.” MELUS 17, no. 4 (winter 1991-1992): 57-79.

In the following essay, Weixlmann compares the different qualities that Reed and Clarence Major bring to the genre of the novel.

we assume a musical solo is a personal statement / we think the poet is speakin for the world. there's something wrong there, a writer's first commitment is to the piece, itself. how the words fall & leap / or if they dawdle & sit down fannin themselves.

—ntozake shange

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Reenacting a mid-twentieth-century debate between the Marxists and the American New Critics, scholars of African American writing during the 1960s and '70s often disputed the relative importance of attending to a work's content, as opposed to its form. More recently, disagreements have centered on the appropriateness of critics' using contemporary theoretical models associated with Europe to help...