SOURCE: Slote, Ben. “Part 3: The Critics.” In Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 143-52. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

In the following essay, originally published as “Listening to ‘The Goophered Grapevine’ and Hearing Raisins Sing” in American Literary History in 1994, Slote explores race iconography in Chesnutt's short stories and compares it to the iconography used in modern television commercials.

Like a lot of young academics who came to their interest in American literature through canonical routes, I first studied Charles Chesnutt's writing in the mid-1980s by reading The Conjure Woman and teaching “The Goophered Grapevine.” I have since discovered the distortions that attend this introduction when it, like any other, is made to stand for even so brief a literary career. Yet, from trying to teach the story a half dozen times in survey courses, reading some of the ingenious historical and poststructuralist criticism...