143 research outputs found
A politics of conversion: nihilism and love in Toni Morrison's fiction
Get PDFTese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras.O estudo Uma Política de Conversão: Niilismo e Amor na Ficção de Toni Morrison começa com a idéia de que a Literatura Afro-Americana apresenta um sentido de auto-reflexividade e hibridismo, através do qual autobiografia dialoga com romance, o espiritual se funde com o político. A partir deste traço dialógico a auto-reflexividade é politicamente estabelecida entre niilismo e amor. Na política de conversão, o estudo analisa as formas como mulheres negras, individualmente ou em grupo, fogem da escravidão para a liberdade, avançam da individualidade para a coletividade, ou substituem niilismo por amor. Metodologicamente o estudo apresenta sete capítulos. O primeiro discute os aspectos dialógicos que ilustram as conexões entre narrativas espirituais, de escravos e ficção, entre espiritualidade e política. O segundo examina o diálogo entre a conversão, pregação pública e formação da comunidade em Diário e Experiências Religiosas de Lee. O capítulo sugere que ao afirmar espiritualidade e humanidade a narradora abre profundo espaço para a mulher negra reclamar direitos civis. O terceiro discute o diálogo no interior da política de conversão entre narrativa de escravos e ficção. Este diálogo lida com niilismo e amor em Incidentes de Jacobs e Amada, Sula e O Olho Mais Azul de Morrison. Para a análise de niilismo e amor valores individuais e coletivos são considerados em relação a cinco aspectos: ambiente e agente antagonistas, agente de apoio, propósito da personagem e resultado alcançado. É visível, no estudo, o apoio que certas mulheres recebem de suas comunidades para contra-atacar antagonistas. O apoio nem sempre resulta na superação do niilismo e, por isso, derrota temporária pode ocorrer antes que elas sejam reintegradas à comunidade, como acontece com Linda Brent. O quarto capítulo examina as fraquezas e as energias da política da conversão e a reintegração de Sethe Suggs à comunidade de Bluestone Road. O quinto avalia como a comunidade de Bottom tenta controlar a individualidade de Sula Peace e como um grupo de mulheres lideradas por Nel Wrights consegue resgatar o espírito de independência da heroína. O sexto mostra como a política da conversão das mulheres de Lorain é incapaz de garantir a saúde mental de Pecola Breedlove, mas consegue criar um papel mais consistente para o grupo. No sétimo, a conclusão examina da relação dialética entre niilismo e amor ou auto-amor nas experiências dos indivíduos e dos grupos. O estudo sugere que em Incidentes a busca de Linda Brent por liberdade envolve elementos de autodestruição e de autoempoderamento. Da mesma maneira, o estudo conclui que em Amada o amor que Sethe Suggs tem para as suas crianças mata a própria filha, enfatizando, assim, o desejo de livrá-la da escravidão. Igualmente em Sula, a individualidade de Sula Peace não apenas limita, mas também expande as experiências do grupo, levando-o à emancipação. Finalmente, em O Olho Mais Azul a luta de Pecola Breedlove por amor e beleza reflete auto-ódio ao mesmo tempo em que reconstrói a auto-apreciação de toda a comunidade
Transforming America : Toni Morrison and classical tradition
Get PDFThis thesis examines a significant but little-studied feature of Toni Morrison's
work: her ambivalent engagement with classical tradition. Analysing all eight
novels. it argues that her allusiveness to the cultural practices of Ancient Greece
and Rome is fundamental to her political project. Illuminating hegemonic
America's consistent recourse to the classical world in the construction of its
identity, I expand on prior scholarship by reading Morrison's own revisionary
classicism as a subversion of dominant US culture. My three-part study
examines the way her deployment of Graeco-Roman tradition destabilizes
mythologies of the American Dream, prevailing narratives of America's
history, and national ideologies of purity. Part I shows that Morrison enlists
tragic conventions to problematize the Dream's central tenets of upward
mobility, progress and freedom. It argues that while her engagement with Greek
choric models effects her refutation of individualism, it is her later novels'
rejection of a wholly catastrophic vision that enables her to avoid reinscribing
the Dream. Part II demonstrates that it is through her classical allusiveness that
Morrison rewrites American history. Her multiply-resonant echoes of the epic,
pastoral and tragic traditions that have consistently informed the dominant
culture's justifications for and representations of its actions enable her
reconfiguration of colonization, of the foundation of the new nation, of slavery
and its aftermath and of the Civil Rights Movement. Part III illuminates how
the author uses the discourse of pollution or miasma to challenge
Enlightenment-derived valorizations of racial purity and to expose the practices
of scapegoating and revenge as flawed means to moral purity. Her interest in
the hegemonic fabrication of classical tradition as itself a pure and purifying
force is matched by her insistence on that tradition's African elements, and thus
on its potent impurity. Her own radical classicism, therefore, is central to the
transformation of America that her novels envision
"Shuttles in the rocking loom of history": dislocation in Toni Morrison's fiction
Get PDFThis thesis examines the trope of 'dislocation' within the later novels of Toni Morrison, identifying it as central to her representation ot African American history and experience. Organising my project around the theme and figure of dislocation allows me to bring together diverse considerations such as those of the geographical, communal, familial, cultural, corporeal and narrative displacements that preoccupy Morrison's fiction. Developing a line of enquiry neglected within the field of scholarship addressing Morrison's work, most importantly my thesis finds this term useful for negotiating the author's engagement with the diaspora engendered by racial slavery. In particular, it explores her evocation of the black diaspora as a configuration encompassing sites of remembering, affirmation and potentiality as well as processes of displacement, disruption, deracination and loss.
My research is informed by a broad range of critical resources but especially Edouard Glissant's and Paul Gilroy's theories of diasporic interaction. Tracing symbolic spatial trajectories and enabling and disabling relationships to the past, I investigate Morrison's imaginary in terms of a black Atlantic of roots and routes, patterns of traversal, connection and exchange. Rejecting a narrowly defined notion of African American Studies, this thesis seeks to extend the ways in which Morrison's novels are approached, locating in them a truly diasporic vision
Women Look into Love: Reimaginings of Heterosexual Love in Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Get PDFThis thesis explores how contemporary women writers write about heterosexual love, considering not only the ways it has been implicated in patriarchal models and traditional romance plots, but also its portrayal in light of developments in feminism and fiction in the 1990s and 2000s. The thesis examines Carol Shields’s The Republic of Love (1992), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1993), Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001), Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto (2001), Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000) and Doris Lessing’s Love, Again (1995). In this study it emerges that as well as illustrating continuities, the scope of the treatment of love is opened up further in recent fiction as aspects like age or social, economic and historical factors are centralised and considered in interesting ways. The thesis also identifies some positive approaches to heterosexual love, as in, for example, the emphasis on men’s capacity for emotions. However, this is not always the case, as a writer like Lessing further develops a vision of love without providing an affirmative view. Thus, the contemporary women writers’ work can be said to contribute to understandings of heterosexual love on many different levels, even as feminist criticisms of repressive, patriarchal forms of romantic relationship continue to remain relevant
Open destinies : modern American women and the short story cycle
Get PDFThis thesis examines the juncture between the short story cycle form and gender politics. It explores how twentieth-century women from the United States have been using the form to represent and question gender identity. The introduction outlines commentaries on the story cycle and considers definitions of the form. It includes case studies of earlier twentieth-century cycles by American women: cycles such as Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps that have been passed over by critics of the form.
Chapter One presents Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples as a cycle paradigm, examining conventions such as the form's metafictional dimension and its preoccupation with communal identity. Chapter Two argues that Grace Paley's scattered Faith narratives set a standard for more dispersed versions of the form. Chapter Three considers how Joyce Carol Oates uses the sequential cycle to represent gender identity as a social construct. Chapters Four and Five examine the macrocosmic cycles of Gloria Naylor and Louise Erdrich and consider changes in their form and gender politics. The final 'composite' chapters explore postmodern versions of the form such as Susan Minot's Monkeys. The prose works of Sandra Cisneros stretch across the story cycle continuum, whilst Toni Morrison's Paradise is universally regarded as a novel. Readings of contemporary cycles by Melissa Bank, Elissa Schappell and Emily Carter demonstrate that American women are re-invigorating the form to facilitate the plural identity of the postmodern heroine
The representation of trauma in narrative : a study of six late twentieth century novels
Get PDFThis thesis conducts a close analysis of representations of trauma in six
late twentieth century novels. I construct a theoretical framework by examining
debates about trauma and narrative which have taken place in the fields of
historiography, social studies, psychoanalysis and literary fiction. By drawing on
these debates, I argue that the relationship between narrative and trauma is
paradoxical: narrative is an essential tool, both for working-through and bearing
witness to the trauma, but it can also intentionally or unintentionally be used to
create an inauthentic version of events.
I illustrate the need felt by many late twentieth century theorists for the
development of a narrative form that will be able to produce an effective version
of trauma. This narrative needs to facilitate working-through and enable
witnessing of trauma. However, it must strive to avoid producing a falsifying
version of the trauma. I argue that it can achieve this by acknowledging its own
provisionality and therefore highlighting the limitations but also the necessity of
narrative representations of trauma.
I argue that the six contemporary novels I have chosen are examples of
narratives that strive to develop a more effective means of representing trauma.
The novels explore their concerns about trauma and narrative on both a thematic
and formal level. The story told in each novel follows a similar pattern of events:
in each novel the protagonist is depicted as suffering from the effects of trauma;
they all try to evade their traumas by creating falsifying versions of their
experiences; and they all offered a means of interpreting which will allow them to
work-though and, therefore, bear witness to their traumas. Finally, the six authors
utilise their narrative strategies to teach their readers this therapeutic and ethical
hermeneutics which corresponds with contemporary concerns about trauma and
narrative
On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games:25 years later
Get PDF@article{dung:aij95, author ="P. Dung", title=" and its fundamental role in non-monotonic reasoning, logic programming and
Forming Participant Teams in Simulation Games
No full textSeveral options are available to administrators in forming participant teams in simulation gaming. These options include: (1) random selection, (2) participant selection, and (3) balanced-selection procedures. The key evaluation criteria in choosing a selection strategy include: (1) competitiveness, (2) peer relations, and (3) realism. This paper postulates that balanced- selection procedures yield significant advantages as compared to alternative methods
Ancestral presence and epic fulfillment in Toni Morrison 's Beloved and Sula, 1994
Get PDFThe focal point of this study is the examination of ancestral remembrance and the effects of that presence on the epic fulfillmeht of the female heroic characters in two of Toni Morrisons novels Beloved and Sula. As a comparative study, this dissertation concerns itself with identifying the common cultural assumptions, values and traditions attributed to the African world and the African Americans illustrated in two of Morrisons novels. To this end, the ontological principles that unify African world culture and the accompanying cosmological categories delineate the discussion of motifs, images, and archetypes employed by Morrison to invoke the ancestral presence. Moreover, this study explores the use of ritual defined by deliberate rhetoric that frames apocalyptic ideas and advances epic achievement
Black violence and the politics of representation: selected readings in the twentieth century American novel
No full textPhDThis thesis argues that the representation of black violence in the twentieth
century American novel is shaped by two principal rhetorical strategies, which I term
denial and demonisation. Denial refers to modes of literary discourse which seek to refute
the possibility of black violence, or to circumscribe it as an exclusively intraracial
phenomenon. Demonisation denotes textual strategies which figure a racially determined
form of violence as a natural element of black character. These strategies may appear
antithetical, but they are rarely deployed in isolation. Rather, they appear in complex
combinations in most representations of black violence in American literature, as I
demonstrate using a range of novels by black and white authors which span the twentieth
century. These strategies have their roots in racist ideologies which seek to obliterate any
connection between the impact of racism upon African Americans and black violence.
Hence they are most noticeable in literary texts which reflect and contribute to racist
ideology. However, texts which seek to expose social and cultural causes of black
violence are also unavoidably influenced by these modes of literary discourse, and this
includes the work of African American authors. They have to negotiate the racist tropes
and assumptions encoded within the language and literary forms of hegemonic American
culture, because they have no alternative, completely separate resources for cultural
production. External pressures experienced by any author representing black violence
compound these difficulties. These include the demands of black community leaders and
white liberals not to represent African Americans in ways which may hinder the cause of
racial equality, and the demands of publishers to represent black violence in ways with
proven commercial potential. Furthermore, despite the retreat of racism in modern
America, certain images and fantasies of blackness retain a hold over the American
cultural imaginary, and continue to influence literary discourse. As my thesis
demonstrates, this ensures that denial and demonisation can still be detected in
contemporary American novels
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