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Department of African American Studies
3553 Cullen Boulevard
Agnes Arnold Hall, Room 629
Houston, TX 77204-3047

W. Lawrence Hogue, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Professor

Moores Distinguished Professor

Phone: (713) 743-2950

Email: whogue@uh.edu

Office: 221B Agnes Arnold Hall

CV

Lawrence Hogue received his PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University, with an emphasis on 20th Century American literature, U S Minority literatures, and Critical Theory. He was one of the first critics to raise questions about literary production, representation, and canon formation in African American literature, opening up an entirely new area of intellectual inquiry. He is the author of Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text, which has been republished as an e-book (Duke 1986), Race, Modernity; Post-modernity: A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s (SUNY 1996); The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (SUNY 2003); Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (Illinois 2009); Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives(SUNY 2013); and A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature: An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation (2020). He wrote the introduction to Clarence Major’s My Amputations (reissued 2008), and is researching and writing a literary biography of the novelist Charles Wright. He is the recipient of a Ford Foundation-National Research Council Fellowship, as well as several grants and fellowships here at the University of Houston. He has book reviews, book chapters, and articles published in the major journals and critical anthologies in the academy.

Active in American Literature, African American Literature, Minority Literatures, Postmodern Literature, and Critical Theory, he has lectured and presented papers at universities and conferences throughout the United States and Canada. His interest in postmodern fiction and diasporic African literatures has taken him to Brazil, Germany, Spain, France, and Argentina. 

Invested in contemporary archival research, he has been a fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and has visited the New York Public Library (Manuscripts and Archives Division); the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; UCLA Library Special Collections; Special Collections, University of Delaware; Special Collections, the University of Maryland, College Park; the B. B. King (Blues) Museum, Indianola; MS.; and Margaret Walker Center, Jackson State University, Jackson, MS.

Education

  • Ph.D., Stanford University

  • M.A., University of Chicago

  • B.A., cum laude, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

  • University of Ife, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Teaching Interests

  • Dr. Hogue teaches undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars on Contemporary American Fiction, U S Minority literatures, Modern American literature, Critical Theory, Postmodern Fiction, African American Fiction, and Native American and Asian American literatures.

Publications

Books

  • A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature:  An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation (Anthem Press, 2020)
  • Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives (SUNY Press, 2013)
  • Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (Illinois, 2009)
  • The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (SUNY Press, 2003)
  • Race, Modernity, Postmodernity:  A Look at the History and the Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s (SUNY Press, 1996)
  • Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text (Duke University Press, 1986)

Book Chapters

  • “Literary Production:  A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice” in Studies in Black American Literary Criticism Vol. II:  Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester Fortenot (Greenwood, Florida:  The Penkevill Publishing Co., 1986):  31-45

  • “Literary Production:  A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice” in Within the Circle:  An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism From The Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham:  Duke University Press, l994):  329-347

  • “Discourse of the Other:  The Third Life of Grange Copeland” in Modern Critical Views:  Alice Walker, edited by Harold Bloom (New York:  Chelsea House Publishers, 1989):  97-114

  • “Historiographic Metafiction and the Celebration of Differences:  Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” in Productive Postmodernism:  Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies, edited by John Duvall (Albany:  SUNY Press, 2002):  93-110

  • “Postmodernism, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, and the Construction of the Black/Woman of Color as Primal Other,” in WOMEN & OTHERS:  Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Empire (Signs of Race).  Edited by Celia R. Daileader, Rhoda E. Johnson, and Amilcar Shabazz  (New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2007):  83-104

  • “The Heirs to Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction” in Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory. Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. New York: Bloomburg Academic Press, May 2016: 1-29. 

Articles

  • “History, the Feminist Discourse, and Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland” in MELUS 12 (Summer 1985):  45-62

  • “An Unresolved Modern Experience:  Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory” in The Americas Review 20 (Spring 1992):  52-64

  • “The Limits of Modernity:  Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips” in MELUS 19 (Winter 1994):  75-90

  • “Post-modernity Comes to Montgomery:  Richard Perry’s Montgomery’s Children” in Obsidian II:  Black Literature in Review 9 (Spring-Summer 1994):  1-25

  • “Problematizing History:  David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident” in CLA Journal 38 (June l995):  441-460

  • “An Existential Reading of Charles Wright’s The Messenger” in MELUS 26 (Winter 2001):  113-145

  • “Disrupting the White/Black Binary:  William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer in CLA Journal 44 (September 2000): 1-42

  • “Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative:  Major’s Reflex, Morrison’s Jazz, and Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo” in Novel:  A Forum On Fiction 35 (Spring/Summer 2002):  169-192

  • “Radical Democracy, African American (Male) Subjectivity, and John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire” in MELUS 33.3 (Fall 2008): 45-69

  • “Can The Subaltern Speak?  A Postcolonial, Existential Reading of Richard Wright’s Native Son” in the Special Issue:  Richard Wright, Citizen of the World: A Centenary Celebration, The Southern Quarterly 46.2 (Winter 2009): 9-39

  • “The Blues, Individuated Subjectivity, and James Baldwin’s Another Country,” CLA Journal, 56.1 (September 2012): 1-29

  • “Televangelism, the South, Modernity, and Darcey Steinke’s Jesus Saves,” The Southern Quarterly 53.2 (Winter 2016): 108-129.

  • “The Emergence, Renaissance, and Transformation of Multicultural American Literature from the 1960s to the Early 2000s,” Symploke 26.1-2 (December 2018): 173-190.

Reviews/Review-Eessays

  • “Approaching History Poly-centrically:  A Review of Historians and Race:  Autobiography and the Writing of History,” edited by Paul. A. Cimbala and Robert F. Hemmelberg in Biography, an interdisciplinary quarterly 21(1998):  341-348

  • A Review of Aldon Lynn Neilsen’s Black Chant:  Languages of African-American Postmodernism in Modern Fiction Studies 44 (1998): 398-402

  • A Review of Darryl Dickson-Carr’s African American Satire:  The Sacredly Profane Novel in Canadian Review of American Studies 31:4 (2001): 2001-2003

  • A Review of A. Yemisi Jimoh’s Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction:  Living in Paradox in CLA Journal 46 (2002); 279-284

  • A Review of Sabrina Hassumani’s Salman Rushdie:  A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works. SAWNET (South Asian Women’s NETwork) at sawnet.org/books/Sabrina_Hassumani.htlm (February 2003)

  • A Review of Manliness & Its Discontents:  The Black Middle Class & The Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930, by Martin Summers. Modernism/Modernity 13.1 (January 2006):  22-24.

  • A Review of Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since the Sixties by Suzanne W. Jones.  The Southern Quarterly 44 (Fall 2006): 194-197.

  • “Urban Life”:  A Review of Holding Pattern: Stories by Jeffery Renard Allen.  American Book Review 30.4  (May/June, 2009):  16

  • “Blackfeet Difference”:  A Review of LedFeather by Stephen Graham Jones.  American Book Review 30.5 (July/August 2009): 17, 26.

  • “Reconfiguring The Textbook”:  A Review of Architectures of Possibility:  After Innovative Writing by Lance Olsen.  American Book Review 33.4 (May/June 2012): 27-28.

  • “Hybrid Subjectivity”: A Review of Keith E. Byerman’s The Art and Life of Clarence Major. American Book Review 34.2 (January/February 2013): 17-18.

  • “A Cosmopolitan Reading”: A Review of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland.  American Book Review 36. 4 (July/August 2015): 8-9.

  • “Demanding Art”: A Review of Dreaming Out Loud: African American Novelists at Work, edited by Horace A. Porter. American Book Review 37.3 (March/April 2016): 23-24.

  • A Review of Darryl Dickson-Carr’s Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem Renaissance. CLA Journal 59.2 (December 2015): 208-211. (Summer 2016)