President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have
received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and
University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in
which he composed them social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far
generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent
surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands literary
to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful artful writing brings to the
surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form thereby revealing what
Edward W. Said famously defined as the worldliness of the literary object. In the case of
President Obama's writings and Dreams from My Father in particular those relationships are
evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition rhetorical modes and historical
narratives. By positioning the literary at this vantage at the point where writing and the
world converge the volume's contributors assert the indispensable and urgent import of
understanding the President not only in political terms but more importantly in literary
terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.
