1,723,655 research outputs found
Toni Morrison An Ethical Poetics
No full textToni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience.Intro -- Contents -- Abbreviations for Works by Toni Morrison -- Introduction -- From Witnessing to Death Dealing: On Speaking of and for the Dead -- Burnt Offerings: Law and Sacrifice -- Time Out of Joint: The Temporal Logicof Morrison's Modernist Apocalyptics -- Beginnings and Endings, Part One: Old Languages / New Bodies -- Beginnings and Endings, Part Two: The Poetics of Similitude and Disavowal at Utopia's Gates -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- IndexToni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison
No full textLively and accessibly written, this Introduction offers readers a guide to the complex and rewarding literature of Toni Morrison.Cover -- The Cambridge Introduction to: Toni Morrison -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1 Life -- 1931-1955 -- 1955-1977 -- 1977-1993 -- Since 1993 -- Chapter 2 Works -- Introduction to the Fiction -- The Bluest Eye (1970) -- Sula (1973) -- Song of Solomon (1977) -- Michigan -- Pennsylvania -- Shalimar, Virginia -- Back to Michigan -- Back to Virginia Again -- Tar Baby (1981) -- Beloved (1987) -- Part I -- Part II -- Part III -- Jazz (1992) -- The City -- The Narrator -- Violet -- Joe -- Golden Gray -- Dorcas and Alice -- Paradise (1998) -- The Past -- The Present -- The Future -- Love (2003) -- A Mercy (2008) -- Other Creative Work -- "Recitatif" (1983) -- District Storyville (1982) -- Dreaming Emmett -- Margaret Garner -- Desdemona -- Books for Children -- Nonfiction -- Morrison on Her Own Life and Work -- Literary Criticism -- Politics, Society, Language, and Literature -- Chapter 3 Contexts -- Morrison and African-American History and Tradition -- Slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction -- Black Migration and Urbanization -- From the 1950s and 1960s to the Present Day -- Morrison and Dominant American Culture -- Morrison and African Cultures and Traditions -- Morrison, Transnational Perspectives, Modernism, and Postmodernism -- Chapter 4 Reception -- The Critical Field -- The 1970s -- 1980s -- The 1990s -- Since 2000 -- The Status and Reputation of "Toni Morrison" -- Notes -- 1 Life -- 2 Works -- 3 Contexts -- 4 Reception -- Guide to Further Reading -- IndexLively and accessibly written, this Introduction offers readers a guide to the complex and rewarding literature of Toni Morrison.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
Pain, hunger, and birth of epiphany in the novels of Toni Morrison
Get PDFThe thesis, entitled The Pain, Hunger, and Birth of Epiphany in the Novels of
Toni Morrison, is divided into three chapters. The introduction discusses some of the
traditional uses of the word “epiphany” in literature and then proceeds to define the
ways in which Morrison’s characters experience epiphanical journeys. Furthermore,
Morrison’s development of the idea plays a fundamental role in the structure and
unification of all of her novels.
The first chapter compares the texts Love and Sula and charts the progression of
pain from external, communal, and inherited to internal, individual, and isolationist. In
both Love and Sula, death and the body are irrelevant, and it is only when characters
learn to dispel pain and disregard the body that they can truly experience an epiphany.
Chapter two discusses Paradise in detail and describes the role of food in allowing or
preventing characters’ spiritual awakenings or transcendence. Food and the way it is
consumed, prepared, grown, and perceived are inextricably linked to characters’
journeys to epiphany. The third chapter compares the novels Jazz and Song of Solomon
and illustrates the ways in which perceptions of pain and food are translated to younger
generations. It also raises questions of generational sterility and degeneration as well as
conveys ideas of stunted or aborted growth and truncated epiphanies
La tradición afroamericana en Beloved de Toni Morrison
No full textThis article is a critical study of Beloved, Toni Morrison\u27s latest novel, and winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Price. In it, I penetrate the linguistic wealth and the stylistic variety of the novel, trying to explore the Afroamerican tradition that pervades it. Themes such as slavery, the impact of the community, human relationships and love in all their facets, the search for one\u27s roots, or the strength of the black female are on this occasion treated by Toni Morrison more bravely and openly than ever, and are surrounded by the evocative symbolism of the African folklore. All these ingredients form a magic story, but non the less credible, which is a mixture of deep reflection, historic document and bitter cry of protest
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
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
"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
Reconstructing identities: a study of Toni Morrison´s beloved and Dionne Brand´s at the full and change of the moom
Get PDFDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e ExpressãoAnálise das obras Beloved e At the Full and Change of the Moon, investigando de que maneira a reconstrução do passado, presente nestes dois romances, influencia a reconstrução da identidade negra. Para esta análise, utilizei alguns conceitos sobre identidade discutidos por Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall e Cornel West. Estes entendem a identidade negra como um conceito que foi construído através da imposição de estereótipos coloniais. Além disso, vêem a identidade negra mais como um processo do que algo já fixado. Como nos romances analisados o passado colonial é "re-contado", tento mostrar aqui a relação da escravatura com as estratégias de identificação que as duas autoras retratam em suas obras. Já que cada autora narra experiências diferentes e fala de um local enunciativo específico, elas também retratam diferentes estratégias de formação de identidade. Em Beloved, a identidade é construída através da resistência à dominação branca, o que leva a uma estratégia emancipatória de sobrevivência. Já em At the Full and Change of the Moon, a identidade negra é desintegrada, pois os negros estão espalhados por todo o mundo, o que leva a uma estratégia assimilacionista. Este trabalho conclui que as duas autoras tentam mostrar a importância do entendimento da experiência de escravidão para a reconstrução das identidades negra
"Toni Morrison - sort verdenslitteratur"
No full textToni Morrison, litteraturvidenskab, sort litteratu
Literature as Prophecy: Toni Morrison as Prophetic Writer
Get PDFFrom fourteenth century medieval literature to contemporary American and African American literature, researchers have singled out and analyzed writing from every genre that is prophetic in nature, predicting or warning about events, both revolutionary and dire, to come. One twentieth-century American whose work embodies the essence of warning and foretelling through history-laden literature is Toni Morrison. This modern-day literary prophet reinterprets eras gone by through what she calls “re-memory” in order to guide her readers, and her society, to a greater understanding of the consequences of slavery and racism in America and to prompt both races to escape the pernicious effects of this heritage. Several critics have recognized and written about Morrison’s unique style of prophetic prose. These critics, however, have either taken a general cursory analysis of her complete body of works or they are only focused on one of her texts as a site of evidence. Despite the many critical essays and journal articles that have been written about Morrison as literary prophet, no critic has extensively investigated Morrison’s major works by way of textual analysis under this subject, to discuss Morrison prophetic prose, her motivation for engaging in a form of prophetic writing, and the context of this writing in a wider general, as well as an African-American, tradition. This dissertation takes on a more comprehensive, cross-sectional analysis of her works that has been previously employed, concentrating on five of Morrison’s major novels: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, in an order to assess how Morrison develops and infuses warnings and admonitions of biblical proportions. This investigation seeks to reveal Morrison’s motivation to prophecy to Americans, black and white, the context in which she engages with her historical and contemporary subjects, and the nature of the admonitions to present and future action she offers to what she sees as a contemporary generation of socially and historically oblivious African Americans, using literary prophecy as the tool by which to accomplish her objectives. This dissertation also demonstrates—by way of textual analysis and literary theory—the evolution through five novels of Morrison’s development as a literary prophet.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
- …
