“The Beauty and the Pain”: Image of the Tree in Beloved (original) (raw)
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2010
The emergent term, traumatic fiction describes the extraordinary violence inflicted on individuals and groups during a traumatic twentieth-century history which encompasses two world wars, various genocides, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Traumatic fiction narratives mirror the neurosis of traumatic experience by distorting conventional narrative structures and using literary techniques like fragmentation, textual gaps, and repetition. They critique the social, economic, and political structures which make and maintain trauma. Traumatic fiction narratives focus on the problems of amnesia and memory in the construction of the historical narrative. It questions a "true" historical narrative by focusing on traditionally suppressed voices. Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved (1987) exemplifies this genre of traumatic fiction. However, critics have confused Toni Morrison's traumatic fiction writing style with music. Critics like Lars Eckstein, Peter J. Capuano, and ...
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2015
VIOLATING MATERNITY: SERVITUDE, SEXUAL ABUSE, LYNCHING AND THE (UN)MAKING OF THE BLACK MATERNAL SUBJECT Michele Sharon Frank Herman Beavers This dissertation argues that African American women writers have identified the black maternal figure as a primary symbol of black cultural trauma. Through an examination of selected texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, I isolate writers’ and dramatists’ explorations of servitude, sexual abuse and lynching as systemic, historical violations of blackness and womanhood that have shaped black women’s maternal experiences. African American women writers’ depictions of black women’s experience of and resistance to such systemic violations of themselves, their children, and their communities reveal how their traumatized subjectivities defy facile understandings of maternal connection, love and protection. This dissertation argues that the writers’ construction of this maternal aesthetic signals an enduring concern with the intergenera...
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WRITING THE SACRED Beloved’s Poetics of Life
2006
Beloved is a poetical and sacred performance that rhythms the historically split being into vitality and beauty again. Drawing on the disruptive truth of repetition, the novel lets in the discourse of the unconscious, both a bodily and verbal complex whose energetic drives and phonemes are poetized,1 and myth, the presence of which tallies with the eruption of the sacred.2 The interactive play between semiotics and energy on the one hand, and myth
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