Endowed, a comic novel - Softcover

Woodson, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1480063703 ISBN 13: 9781480063709

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012

Synopsis

“Mammy~Diva Theory” is the peculiar career path to money and success for an ambitious English professor at one of the nation’s most prestigious HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). But first the professor has to raise millions of dollars for an endowed chair in a department that has been sidelined in the competition for student happiness.

Endowed, a comic novel is a cultural piñata of thought experiments, government agencies, urban novels, quantum information, folklore, and celebrities that explodes the falsehoods of Black higher education. Assisted by a globe hopping erotomaniac narratologist, a calculating Chinese beauty, and a gossiping sibyl, Dr. Radley Transuranium cunningly probes the Black community for a willing sugar daddy. Dangerously funny, self-mocking, intellectually daring, and always on the verge of savagery, Endowed explores places in America that previously have been invisible for good reasons.

About this title

About the Author:

Jon Woodson (1944-) was born in Washington, DC. An innate surrealist sensibility was instilled in me during my time wandering the bomb-damaged streets of Frankfurt, Germany at the age of eight years old in 1952. I never completely recovered from being taken to see Carl Sandburg when he was performing for Negro children at the Library of Congress in about 1956.Realizing the dangerous tendencies in my personality, my parents tried to turn me into a normal person by forceful applications of baseball on the radio and brutal tennis training. I rebelled by becoming a vicious amateur radio operator, transmitting Morse code through the Cold War nights. Once I discovered science fiction and Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy --read at the age of fourteen--the hopes for my recovery were grim. I was sent away to a New England preparatory school at fifteen, where I suffered a further decline by discovering Beat literature and dada. I finished high school in Washington, DC,where I began to write poetry and was published in the Howard University literary magazine, Stylus, which ran a contest for high school students. At the University of Rhode Island I published poems and edited the literary journal.After earning an M.A. in English from U.R.I. in 1969, I taught at LincolnUniversity in the 13 College Curriculum Program (TCCCP). From 1971 to 1979 I studied literature at Brown University and taught at George Mason University. After publishing a poem in an important anthology of African-American literature in1971, I turned away from poetry, since it was impossible to stomach the ruinous course of American literary culture. I wrote a dissertation that read Melvin B. Tolson's poetry through the lens of Gurdjieff's esotericism, a view that was immediately rejected by other scholars. I have since worked to explore the esoteric cast of American modernism and have published To Make a New Race:Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance (1999) an account of how Tolson was introduced to esotericism by contact with the members of the HarlemRenaissance, many of whom were writing coded esoteric fiction and poetry. I have taught at Towson University and at Howard University. As a Fulbright lecturer in American Literature, I taught at two Hungarian universities in 2006. I now am at work on a series of comic novels.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1480063703
• ISBN 13: 9781480063709
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228