Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction

Abstract In this essay, I argue that the apparent historical inaccuracies contained within Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (Nordan, Lewis. 2003 [1993]. Wolf Whistle . Chapel Hill: Algonquin) represent a systematic repeal of the controversial history surrounding the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Nordan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Semiotica
Main Author: Vayo, Brendon
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Walter de Gruyter GmbH 2018
Subjects:
Literature and Literary Theory
Linguistics and Language
Language and Linguistics
Chapel Hill
algonquin
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/sem-2016-0037
http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/semi.2018.2018.issue-225/sem-2016-0037/sem-2016-0037.xml
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0037/pdf
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Summary:Abstract In this essay, I argue that the apparent historical inaccuracies contained within Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (Nordan, Lewis. 2003 [1993]. Wolf Whistle . Chapel Hill: Algonquin) represent a systematic repeal of the controversial history surrounding the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Nordan reconstitutes the principle characters to function as iconoclasms of the historical record. As iconoclasms, these representations undermine our culture’s accepted model of history, what Hayden White terms the “historical account” (White, Hayden. 1975. Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 30).

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