African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison
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Colonial Trauma, Utopian Carnality, Modernist Form : Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
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Understandings of trauma in the colonial context fall largely into two strands. A therapeutic strand endorses the potential for “healing” from colonial trauma in the present, postcolonial era but fails to grasp how much this era reprises the toxins of colonialism itself. This view implicitly encourages the once-colonized to align themselves with the purported “health” of postcolonial modernity. An anti-therapeutic strand grants the need for a critique of the postcolonial but generalizes the historically specific toxins of that era to any and all social orders—hence making it difficult to imagine social change. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things provide more historically astute and dialectical accounts than the theoretical models offer. These examples of postcolonial historical fiction are modernist in form; they explore distinct yet homologous types of domination (slavery and the slave trade on one hand, exploitation colonialism in India on the other) through a similar set of representational techniques. These techniques are crucial to the novels’ political astuteness. The books’ temporally disordered forms at once record the fragmentations and devastations visited on the colonial body and provide intimations of an alternative, erotic futurity in which those bodies will have been made whole.
Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison
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In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives -- psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories -- Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity. With an innovative application of neuroscience to literary criticism, Schreiber explains how trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Slavery and its legacy of cultural rejection create trauma on individual, familial, and community levels, and parents unwittingly transmit their trauma to their children through repetition of their bodily stored experiences. Concepts of'home'-- whether a physical place, community, or relationship -- are reconstructed through memory to provide a positive self and serve as a healing space for Morrison's characters. Remembering and retelling trauma within a supportive community enables trauma victims to move forward and attain a meaningful subjectivity and selfhood.Through careful analysis of each novel, Schreiber traces the success or failure of Morrison's characters to build or rebuild a cohesive self, starting with slavery and the initial postslavery generation, and continuing through the twentieth century, with a special focus on the effects of inherited trauma on children. When characters attempt to escape trauma through physical relocation, or to project their pain onto others through aggressive behavior or scapegoating, the development of selfhood falters. Only when trauma is confronted through verbalization and challenged with reparative images of home, can memories of a positive self overcome the pain of past experiences and cultural rejection.While the cultural trauma of slavery can never truly disappear, Schreiber argues that memories that reconstruct a positive self, whether created by people, relationships, a physical place, or a concept, help Morrison's characters to establish subjectivity. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Schreiber's book unites psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and social theories into a full and richly textured analysis of trauma and the possibility of healing in Morrison's novels.
Reading Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'
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Toni Morrison's Beloved is one of the most successful novels of all time, selling millions of copies internationally and inspiring critical commentary from scholars of the highest distinction. Its influence is such that it is studied by students of literature around the world and is often cited as one of the most significant books of modern times. However, its popularity belies its difficulty: many find the novel hard to read, struggling with its structure and occasionally fragmented style. This guide is designed to help readers engage with this complex work and achieve a deeper understanding of its context, the literary strategies it employs, and the various ways in which it has been interpreted since its publication in 1987.
Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison
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Toni Morrison's Art. a Humanistic Exploration of the Bluest Eye and Beloved
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Toni Morrison, the eighth American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, is perhaps the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature. Astutely, she describes aspects of human lives and, unlike many other writers, reveals the hope and beauty that underlines the worlds ugliness. Her artistic excellence lies in achieving a perfect balance between black literature and writing abouth the universally truth. Although firmly grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work transcends narrowly prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal mythical patterns and overtones. Her novels, thus, mourn on universal concerns. The endeavor in this study is to scrutinize the unspoken lexis of Toni Morrison's works and to unveil the layers of humanistic concerns that provide denotations to her words. Earlier studies on this writer have concentrated on adjudging her as a writer addressing problems of black people. However, this book tries to extend this notion to encompass the problems of whole human community by assimilating blacks in the general drama of life. Before dyeing the strings of Morrison's novels with the colour of humanist concerns, this book delineates the term 'Humanism' from which these humanistic concerns arise.
Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination
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Toni Morrison’s Beloved
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Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.
The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison
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Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.
The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison
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Toni Morrison has written some of the most significant and demanding fiction of the modern age. Her dazzling depictions of African-American experience are studied in high schools and colleges, debated in the media and analyzed by scholars at an astounding rate. This Introduction offers readers a guide to the world of Morrison in all its complexity, from her status as a key player on the global intellectual stage to her unique perspective on American history and her innovative narrative techniques. Covering every novel from The Bluest Eye to A Mercy, Tessa Roynon combines close readings with critical insights into Morrison's other creative work, such as short stories, libretto and song lyrics and unpublished pieces for performance. Lively and accessibly written, Roynon's insightful text is ideal for readers approaching Morrison for the first time as well as those familiar with her work.
How to Analyze the Works of Toni Morrison
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This title explores the creative works of famous author Toni Morrison. Works analyzed include The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Sula, and Paradise. Clear, comprehensive text gives background biographical information of Morrison. The'You Critique It'feature invites readers to analyze other creative works on their own. A table of contents, timeline, list of works, resources, source notes, glossary, and an index are also included. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.
Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination
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"In this compelling new study, Valerie Smith analyzes the celebrated fiction of Morrison in relation to her critical writing about the process of reading and writing literature, the relationship between readers and writers, and the cultural contributions of African-American literature"-- Provided by publisher.
Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition
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Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition explores Toni Morrison's construction of alternative and oppositional narratives of history and places her work as central to the imagining and re-imagining of American and diasporic identities. Covering the Nobel Prize-winning author's novels (up to Home ), as well as her essays, dramatic works and short stories, this book situates Morrison's writings within both African-American and American writing traditions and examines them in terms of her continuous dialogue with the politics, philosophy and literary forms of these traditions.
Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison
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The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison
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