celebratoriness
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Etymology: From celebratory + -ness.
Senses: examples: text: Yet another area of contention is that Borderlands offers a spectacle of the painful splits that constitute Chicanas’ multiple positioning for the voyeuristic delectation of European American readers. In the foreword to the second edition of Bridge, Anzaldúa herself seems to be aware of the backfiring potential of feeding non-Chicana readers’ perception that being a person of color is an exclusively negative experience: ‘Perhaps like me you are tired of suffering and talking about suffering. . . . Like me you may be tired of making a tragedy of our lives. . . . [L]et’s abandon this auto-cannibalism: rage, sadness, fear’ (iv; emphasis in original). Other artists who use the border as a sign of multiplicity have been criticized for the opposite, for an excessive or inappropriate celebratoriness.
ref: 1998, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference’, and the Non-Unitary Subject”, in Lois Parkinson Zamora, editor, Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity (Longman Critical Readers), London; New York, N.Y.: Longman, →ISBN, page 20:
text: Brooks titled her collected poems Blacks. She continually strove to articulate an unambiguous race pride in a woman’s voice that was true to the complex and contradictory poetic details of black people’s lives. She was not hyperbolical; she wrote of mighty heroes and those with feet of clay. In her very celebratoriness she practiced a kind of sober love for community.
ref: 2005, Elizabeth Alexander, “Introduction”, in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (American Poets Project; 19), New York, N.Y.: The Library of America, →ISBN, page xxv:
text: It is also a form of reductiveness that only the hands and the voice are required for working a puppet. However, the desperate, nearly terminal celebratoriness of Sabbath’s Theatre associates this reductiveness with a form of transcendence. Sabbath declares: ‘Contentment is being hands and a voice – looking to be more, students, is madness’ (245).
ref: 2006, Ian Gregson, “Philip Roth’s Vulgar, Aggressive Clowning”, in Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction (Continuum Literary Studies), New York, N.Y.; London: Continuum, →ISBN, page 76:
text: How can figures that seem so clearly taken from popular song serve a holy function in the sanctuary? Does “sexiness” become “celebratoriness” when the context is changed?
ref: 2006, Michael Beckerman, “The Songs of Solomon (Rossi) as the Search for History Michael”, in George B[oyer] Stauffer, editor, The World of Baroque Music: New Perspectives, Bloomington, Ind.; Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, page 134:
text: The diction of some of the new poems has a hallowed, stained-glass simplicity that I don’t always like, and the poems themselves are like minor revisitings of earlier tropes. It is as though Zagajewski has found a way of—no pun intended, but it just about works—“bottling it.” The writing is still fresh, but a little weary in its familiar celebratoriness: “Joy is close,” “the ocean’s skin, on which / ships etch the lines of shining poems,” “should such a splendid upright shape, a king, / be made a horizontal form, a line of print?”
ref: 2014, Michael Hofmann, “Adam Zagajewski”, in Where Have You Been? Selected Essays, New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, part 1, page 165:
glosses: The quality of being celebratory.