Namwali Serpell

At least according to Richard Rorty's extraordinary reading of it.

I think I think of those, I think of Morrison and Nabokov in relation because I wrote about them together in my dissertation, but I,

hadn't actually read The Bluest Eye when I was writing that.

But there's something about their hauteur.

Oh, I love that word.

Yes.

Also, this sense of total command.

Total command.

Yes.

So I think, as I said, Morrison had a real interest in classics, as we might describe them now, when she was a college student at Howard University.

Now, Howard is a historically black college and university and HBCU.

She has these wonderful stories of, well, not so wonderful, I suppose, but she had these funny stories of, for example, wanting to write about the black characters in Shakespeare at Howard and being told that she couldn't.

So she's at a black university studying white canonical literature, some of which is being taught by white professors, some being taught by black professors.

But there's still this real constraint about what you should study and what you can study.

And she played Queen Elizabeth, I believe, in one of Shakespeare's plays.

So she's also doing theater, right?

She then goes to Cornell to do a master's in what would eventually be American literature.

But American literature in the 50s wasn't a fully consolidated field of study.

So she's working with professors who are actually making this a respectable thing to analyze.

And she wrote her master's thesis there.