This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fifth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Cane by Jean Toomer, an unclassifiable modernist masterpiece comprising prose, poetry, and drama, and the inaugural work of the Harlem Renaissance. First, I place Cane in its early-20th-century context of burgeoning African-American cultural consciousness as theorized by thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Then we consider Toomer’s life, with an emphasis on his spiritual questing and racial disaffiliation. Finally, we read the text of Cane itself: its unity-in-diversity, its titular metaphor combing beauty and violence, its tripartite structure joining Southern rural and Northern urban experience, its search in Southern culture for African roots, its interest in female interiority and the failure of love within and between races, its staging of the black intellectual’s alienation, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
