Eco spirituality in the select works of Toni Morrison (original) (raw)
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Many human cultures have venerated forests and trees. The ubiquity of arborphilia across hemispheres, wherever forests have existed, suggests an evolutionary process that allowed adaptation to such arboreal realms throughout the world. Because trees in their constant recycling through the seasons evoke the ambivalence associated with death and renewal, paradoxical perceptions of forests and trees have coexisted throughout history. In Part I, I studied attitudes about forests and groves that have ranged from viewing them as hallowed sanctuaries deserving of protection from desecration, to fearing them as places inhabited by Satan or demonic spirits. In Part II, drawing especially on Jungian theory and depth psychology, I examine more of the ways that tree veneration has been expressed culturally—through music, poetry, folktales, literature, film, and even jokes and advertising—revealing how integral tree imagery is to the formation of neo-romantic environmental ethics.
Working Papers in American Studies , 2020
The volume before you contains a selection of contributions from the workshop “Transformation: Nature and Economy in Modern English and American Culture,” held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb on September 24, 2019. Organized by the Croatian Association for American Studies (CAAS) and the Croatian Association for the Study of English (CASE), the workshop hosted a fine array of international and domestic guests and featured the participation of doctoral students. The editors would like to thank Professor Tatjana Jukić Gregurić and Dr. Martina Domines Veliki, who provided invaluable assistance in the organization of the event. We also thank the participants at the workshop and the authors of the contributions. The workshop was organized as part of the research activities carried out under the auspices of the research group “Transatlantic Literature and the Transformation of the World in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In addition, this issue features a contribution on Toni Morrison, whose work continues to capture the attention of academic and general readers.
Deviancy and Disorder – The Visual Legacy of the Hottentot Venus in the Novels of Toni Morrison
2019
Sarah Bartmann came to Europe in 1808 as one of the thousands of people exhibited and transformed into medical spectacles during the course of the nineteenth century. My thesis explores the historical roots and intersecting perspectives surrounding this charged icon and her transformation into the Hottentot Venus through the works of Toni Morrison. Forming a living, breathing embodiment of ultimate difference, establishing nationalistic boundaries through the dissection and reconstruction of her bodily image, Bartmann highlights the way that science and popular culture work to mutually inform and regulate cultural behaviour. Utilising an exploration of Toni Morrison’s ‘aesthetics of resistance’ – at once ‘highly political and passionately aesthetic,’ Fred Moten’s consideration of the black radical tradition, and Roland Barthes’ contemplation on the function of photography, this research suggests that a difference needs to be drawn between the image of ‘race’ and that of the ‘racial ...
Toni Morrison's Beloved - an Ecofeminist Approach
This paper aims to explore Toni Morrison' Beloved through ecocritical lenses, to destabilize the cultural oppositions master-slave, white-black, man-woman, and to find an affinity of the human domination over nature with the male domination over his female counterpart. The main character of this novel, Sethe, is trying to restore her natural self-identity by reimagining and translating her former passive body into an active one, which possesses agency and the power of narration. Thus, from an object of exploitation and forgotten history, she becomes the subject of her own sexual and maternal desires, and she accomplishes to reunite the past with a promised future. Her symbolic body is felt as a home where her own actions could be taken with dignity and ownership; her body becomes ecological, meaning that the fluid discursive agency of the patriarchal and racial domination is negotiated and reconstructed within the context of the civilized white man domination over the wild nature. The oppositions related to race, gender, society and nature ought to be overcome in order to establish an ontological and epistemological equilibrium between a white patriarchal society and a culturally racialized and gendered nature, between identity and alterity.
REMEMORY AS A STRATEGY OF SUBVERSIVE REPRESENTATION: A FEMINIST READING OF MORRISON’S BELOVED
Special Vol. on New Literatures, ISSN 2319 – 7684, 2013
Toni Morrison reinvented “rememory” in terms of narrative device, representational technique and perspectival discourse in Beloved. Literary narratives partake of the fundamental characteristic of narrative discourse, which is to have not only a tale—an underlying sequence of events with a beginning and an ending—but also a teller. The central concern in studying literary narratives is the role of the teller in the deployment of the tale. Again, Black Feminist literary theories have stressed on the need for alternative reconstructions of the past and narrative strategies of subversive representation in articulating the anguish and trauma of slavery, repressed memories and tales impossible to tell. This paper contends that though Morrison has in certain instances denied ‘feminist concerns’, a feminist reading of Beloved would reinforce her use of “rememory” in the “deployment of the tale“ as an enabling/empowering strategy of subversive representation by black women whose historic “triple marginalization” in the United States of America has been problematized by their painful memories of a trouble-ridden past. Toni Morrison reinvented “rememory” in terms of narrative device, representational technique and perspectival discourse in Beloved. Literary narratives partake of the fundamental characteristic of narrative discourse, which is to have not only a tale—an underlying sequence of events with a beginning and an ending—but also a teller. The central concern in studying literary narratives is the role of the teller in the deployment of the tale. Again, Black Feminist literary theories have stressed on the need for alternative reconstructions of the past and narrative strategies of subversive representation in articulating the anguish and trauma of slavery, repressed memories and tales impossible to tell. This paper contends that though Morrison has in certain instances denied ‘feminist concerns’, a feminist reading of Beloved would reinforce her use of “rememory” in the “deployment of the tale“ as an enabling/empowering strategy of subversive representation by black women whose historic “triple marginalization” in the United States of America has been problematized by their painful memories of a trouble-ridden past.