A Visitation of Narratives
A Visitation of Narratives
Dialogue and Comics in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits
In his 2007 book The Fire This Time, North Carolina author Randall Kenan associates comics with sex and sin. This relationship is evident in his postmodern prose novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989), where Horace Cross, a gay African American teenager in a conservative religious community, struggles to articulate what he feels is the consummate sin of his queer sexual desires. This chapter examines A Visitation of Spirits and the protagonist’s attempts to imagine an alternative way of being in the world, suggesting the dense imbrication of visual and oral cultures of the South. It provides an overview of the connection between comics and oral literature within the framework of Kenan’s novel and the way orality remains a powerful marker by which to characterize southern literature.
Keywords: comics, Randall Kenan, sex, sin, Visitation of Spirits, South, oral literature, orality, southern literature
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