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- Title
A Dilettante Unto Death: Richard Bruce Nugent's Dilettante Aesthetic and Unambitious Failure.
- Authors
Clair, Cody C. St.
- Abstract
I contend that Richard Bruce Nugent embodied dilettantism as a challenge to the professionalist ideologies of racial uplift. Examining Nugent’s writings and biography, I locate his dilettantism in his refusal to specialize in an art and in his disinclination to publish his work. I also locate his dilettantism in his short story “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” wherein his ellipses become a stylistic of failure and laziness that rejects the logics of bourgeois progress and history-making. Repudiating the burden of making history, Nugent’s dilettantism afforded him a creative agency to foster a black queer aesthetic in both his life and art.
- Subjects
NUGENT, Bruce, 1906-1987; DILETTANTISM; AFRICAN American authors; SMOKE, Lilies &; Jade (Short story); DILETTANTISM in literature; AMATEURISM; AFRICAN American literature -- History &; criticism
- Publication
African American Review, 2017, Vol 50, Issue 3, p273
- ISSN
1062-4783
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/afa.2017.0033