Magical Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved Research Papers (original) (raw)

- by
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- Toni Morrison (Literature)

Freedom understood in its narrow political considerations often eludes the finer, more existential questions regarding its nature and extent. It is these finer nuances pertaining to the psyche, memory and lives of the African Americans in post-Abolition American that becomes the centre piece of Toni Morisson's novel, Beloved. This articles, attempts to delineate the innovative use of the idea of a haunted house in Beloved to indicate and explore, the psyches that are haunted and tormented by a gory past. It shall also delve into the tradition of the Gothic novel and its echoes found in Morison's novel. The article highlights how through the motif of a haunting spirit, Morrison engages with repressed memories of slavery, the effects of the repression and a national amnesia about the horrors of institutional slavery. Morison's characters are forced to undergo a process of de-numbing to sensitize them to their own feelings and trauma. This, in turn, leads to a vocalisation and thereby a documentation of the brutal history of the dehumanisation of the community forced into slavery. The article also investigates how the trope of the haunted house is used in the novel, to accord a subjectivity to its characters who hitherto have remained statistics-subsumed within a homogenized taxonomical category deprived of a psyche, emotion and individuality.

- by ISHITA PRASHER
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, the winner of Noble Prize for literature in 1993, is one of the most celebrated and admired writers of African American fiction. She is a globally acclaimed writer, who represented the life of black women in the most realistic manner in her fiction. Black motherhood, the maternal trauma of black women during slavery, is one of the central themes in Morrison's fiction. She presents a penetrating view of black motherhood. Her novels put forth disturbing questions before the society. She makes the reader to think and enhance their understanding of the African American life and culture, especially black women and the traumatic black motherhood. 'Beloved' the most highly acclaimed novel of Toni Morrison, is loosely based on the real life and legal case of the slave Margret Garner, a self emancipated tough mother, who in order to save her children from the outrages of slavery that she had suffered, cut the throat of one of her four children and tried to kill the others as well. This paper is an attempt to present an overview of the maternal trauma of the protagonist, Sethe, in 'Beloved' that she suffers after killing her own daughter in order to save her from the traumatic ordeal of slavery.

- by International Res Jour Managt Socio Human
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- Management, Sociology, Humanities

Magical realism is the genre that deals with questioning reality, rationality and progress, identity, magic and myth in relation to particular contextual and political reflections. In this article, the researcher proposes to address... more

- by IAEME Publication
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- Culture, Modernity, Latin America, Reality Shows

Eco criticism in English literature has emerged as a fascinating field. It studies the relationship between man and nature. Man and nature are inseparable. Man lives with nature and learns from the nature. Nature teaches the mysteries of the world. Eco criticism seen through spiritual lens is called Eco spirituality. “Ecology and Spirituality are fundamentally connected because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is a spiritual awareness” says Fritjof Capra ,an Austrian-born American physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist. Eco spirituality in literature plays a key role in educating the people about the omnipotence of God and man’s spiritual growth in life.This paper highlights Morrison’s artistry in making her readers sensible towards ‘Eco spirituality’- one’s spiritual growth through nature.
Key words: Eco Criticism, Morrison, Spirituality, Christianity, Bible

- by fatoumata keita
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- Narrative, Catharsis, Trial by Ordeal, Language Linguistics and literary studies

This paper argues that the boundary between postmemory and rememory might not be as easily distinguishable as made out to be by firstly analysing identity as either ‘auto-identification’ or ‘allo-identification’ in the terms of Eve... more

- by Hazel Van der Stappen
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- English Literature, Trauma Studies, Postmemory, Rememory

Beyond (Re)Claiming the Child: Power and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Soumyadeep Chakraborty
Abstract
A text with multiple interpretative threads, Toni Morrison’s Beloved unveils Sethe’s story and unleashes how she risks her life, turns into a slave fugitive, kills her daughter to nullify the slave owner’s claim on her and posits resistance against the American slave tradition. American Property Law (that pronounces that only the owner of the property has the right to destroy it) justifies Sethe’s action and establishes her ownership and subsequent claim over the child, Beloved while erasing the slave owner’s. The vigorous act of killing Beloved as means of resistance and the tussling equation in claiming the child echo the problematics of power relationship as theorised by Michael Foucault. In “The Subject and Power” Foucault argues that slavery transfigures into a problematic power relationship through the slave’s possible ‘mobility’ or ‘escape’ or ‘resistance’ in any means (342) and in Power/Knowledge he traces the problematics of power relationship in the inevitable reciprocity between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic subject positions (140-142). Sethe’s mobility, her escape with her daughter and, finally, her act of resistance problematise the power relationship in the text. The conflict between Sethe and the slave owner signals the concomitant reciprocity between the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic subject positions. But Sethe’s act of resistance, on the contrary, could be interpreted as her means of exercising power on Beloved that results in destroying the very object of power exercise and turns her traumatic. Beloved’s spectral presence in the narrative could be seen as Sethe’s traumatic response to the catastrophic event that takes away from her the very object of power exercise. My paper, at this juncture, aims at analysing the nature and prospect of the complex power relations embedded in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It also seeks to investigate how the protagonist’s traumatic responses act as the resonance of intrusive phenomena in the power relations in the narrative.
Keywords: resistance, claim, child, power relationship, hegemonic, counter-hegemonic, trauma.

- by soumyadeep chakraborty
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- American Studies, Children's Literature
- by Susan Mayberry
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- African American
- by Amina Rashid
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- Sociology, Gender Studies, Music and identity, Femininity
- by Catherine G Kodat
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- Sociology, Art History, Art, Opera

Although slavery has ended, the African-American people remained the object of oppression, violence, and racism in the white countries, particularly America, which is the setting of the novel. Beloved, which was written in 1987 by Toni Morison, depicts the multiple sorts of oppression that black people have experienced in America by their white oppressors. On the other hand, Fanon argues that black people in white societies are reduced to mere objects and exploited endlessly, therefore, they develop identity crises and wear white masks to win the approval or equal rights and recognition of the white people. However, regardless of their efforts and endeavors, the black people cannot change white man’s perception about them and remain an alien to them. This paper aims at representing the adversities black people encounter in white societies by applying Fanon’s ideas of psychoanalysis to Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. The paper is a psychoanalytic study, where the reasons behind the a...

- by Sheela Raja
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- Torture, Duty, Girl

This chapter argues that Black feminist thinkers began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Rogers contributes to the development of a genealogy of affect theory that is attentive to these antecedents in Black feminist thought, exposing the under-acknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, and expanding the ways in which affect theory typically is situated in intellectual histories as growing out of late 1990s queer theory, on the one hand, and debates around poststructuralism, on the other. The discussion highlights works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison, arguing that they not only offer compelling commentary on the function of affect as political labor, but also are themselves powerfully affecting, producing “affective flights” that structure the different realities in which subjects live.

- by Jamie A Rogers
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- Sociology, Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Literature

Critics have pointed out that ghosts allow us to "successfully broaden and deepen our world and perhaps open ourselves to a greater reality" (Walker 6). Lois Parkinson Zamora also asserts that ghosts often serve as "guides," and they are, along with much magical realism, "particularly well-suited to enlarging and enriching western ontological understanding," for their "counterrealistic conventions" reject "the binarisms, rationalisms, and reductive materialisms of Western ontological understanding" (119). 1 As such guides, the specters in magical realist

- by Lisa Wenger Bro
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- Class, Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Magical Realism

Tony Morrison’s novel ‘Beloved’ may be counted as a revolutionary novel- as a unique addition to the genre – fictional and the typical slave narrative structure. It is a fair document of the dehumanizing effects of slavery that leave the protagonist Sethe stuck in the past and unable to escape the “continuing apocalypse of racism”. ‘Beloved’ is one of a very few examples of literature that is written in a maternal voice. This novel speaks to the unspeakable, and somewhat incommunicable, rawness of trauma. ‘Beloved’ speaks to the pervasiveness of psychological trauma. Here Toni Morrison tackles life’s darkest elements through the story of an escaped slave based around the murder of her innocent infant. The twisted mother-daughter relationships of ‘Beloved’ showcase the fracturing effect of slavery upon the human mind. Morrison radically presents this phenomenon by granting the psychological effects of slavery a physical embodiment, resurrecting a figure to adopt the secondary selves ...

- by Nutan Yadav
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- English Literature, Education, Higher Education, English language

This paper analytically compares Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) to Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers (2006) to explore the maternal position in Western and Middle Eastern literatures and give the silent mothers voice. These novels depict rudimentary social systems predicated on deep inequalities of class and gender; they highlight the commonality of mothers’ experiences regardless of their class, race, or nationality. In A Mercy, the black mother discards her daughter to protect her from a malevolent master, while in Hend and the Soldiers, the uneducated Arab mother arranges her daughter’s marriage to free her from the domination of the patriarchal society. The daughters consider their mothers as toxic parents and relate all evil in their lives to them. These novels are narrated mainly from a daughter point of view, and they share the themes of the disintegrated mother-daughter relationship and search for identity. This type of narration foregrounds the daughterly perspectives and subordin...

- by Najlaa Aldeeb
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- Gender Studies, Narrative, Daughter

The idea of the Black House will be conceptualized through the literary masterpiece of Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and the film the Last Black Man of San Francisco. Using a Lacanian informed lens with Orlando Patterson's 'Natal Alienation' the paper describes the Black House with concepts such as Kwame Alexander's the "Door of No Return" and Christina Sharpe's "In the Wake". Finally, the paper concludes with a call for sublimation with Dawn Lundy Martin's "A Black Poetics Against Mastery".

- by Pascal Christeller
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- Black/African Diaspora, Phenomenology, Toni Morrison, Lacanian psychoanalysis

Tony Morrison's novel 'Beloved' may be counted as a revolutionary novelas a unique addition to the genrefictional and the typical slave narrative structure. It is a fair document of the dehumanizing effects of slavery that leave the protagonist Sethe stuck in the past and unable to escape the "continuing apocalypse of racism". 'Beloved' is one of a very few examples of literature that is written in a maternal voice. This novel speaks to the unspeakable, and somewhat incommunicable, rawness of trauma. 'Beloved' speaks to the pervasiveness of psychological trauma. Here Toni Morrison tackles life's darkest elements through the story of an escaped slave based around the murder of her innocent infant. The twisted mother-daughter relationships of 'Beloved' showcase the fracturing effect of slavery upon the human mind. Morrison radically presents this phenomenon by granting the psychological effects of slavery a physical embodiment, resurrecting a figure to adopt the secondary selves of the living. This paper explores the crisis of slave life of American in particular and all over the world.

- by Cinnamon Nolley
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- Medicine, Published

Abstract: This thesis explores the complicated images of the trees in Beloved. The archetypal image of the tree as tree of life reflect the pastoral “beauty ” in the south by its regenerative power which assists the black slaves to gain physical flight from the slavery and the former slaves from the psychological grip of the slavery past. The “strange fruit ” of the southern trees and the tree-like scar in Sethe’s back reveals the “pain ” in the slavery south. Beloved’s seemingly perverse image as the residue of the slavery past aggravates this “pain”, but her foils to a revived tree stump representing the tree of history and to the metamorphosing tree-god Dionysus help the former slaves rebuild the bond with their past, thus retrieve the lost “beauty ” in the south. In this sense, the continuity between the two seemingly contradicting concepts—“beauty ” and “pain ” is established.

- by la beauté
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- History, Pain, Beauty, Life
- by David Santiago Lesmes Gonzalez
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- Art

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is a powerful exploration of the complexities of humanity, particularly the impact of slavery on the lives of African Americans. Through her vivid portrayal of the characters and their experiences, Morrison examines the various ways in which humans are capable of both cruelty and compassion. Beloved's presence forces Sethe to confront the past she has tried so hard to forget, and the novel follows her journey towards healing and redemption. Throughout the novel, Morrison portrays the ways in which slavery dehumanized and degraded its victims, robbing them of their sense of self and agency. At the heart of Beloved is Morrison's exploration of the complexities of love, particularly the love between a mother and her child. Sethe's love for her children is both a source of strength and a burden, as she struggles to protect them from the horrors of slavery while also dealing with the trauma of her own experiences.

- by Ijaems Journal
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This thesis examines three novels all communicating ideas about race, gender, and slavery under the conventions of Gothic literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) show how patriarchy oppressed and haunted women while keeping slavery at the margins. Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison, fictionalizes the account of a female slave who murdered her child to assert her power and reject slavery. However, Morrison rewrites and defies aspects of the Gothic mode by bringing the ghost of the murdered child back to life, and later showing steps the community can take to heal from their collective trauma. The third novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative, is assumed to have been written by Hannah Crafts around the mid-late 1850s, but not published until the 21st century. Similar to Morrison, Crafts vocalizes the terrors felt as a result of systemic oppression through her Gothic storytelling techniques but focuses on ways slavery impacted both blacks and whites. Study...

- by Kelly Franklin
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- Gender Studies, Art, Oppression

Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is one of the most prominent recent depictions of the still unhealed wound of slavery which is deeply imbedded into the fabric of American society. Through the literary critical theory of New Historicism, this novel, a fictional piece of literature, can be considered a historical document in its own right, in which the author, although dealing with the 19th century Reconstruction period of the antebellum Civil War, presents, both consciously and subconsciously, her own contemporary notions of this period of America’s past. In other words, this novel has inner voices which desire to express a certain political, historical and social stance, both in accordance with the author’s wishes, but also “independently” so, as the author cannot help but be influenced, in various ways, by the contemporary views on this topic. Thus, Beloved becomes a document of its time, namely the 1980s United States, and represents sometimes conflicting voices regarding the factua...

- by Denis Kuzmanović
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- New Historicism, Historicism, Politics, Spanish Civil War

This article is based on my experience of teaching Nepalese students, who are from different socio-cultural backgrounds. The study proposes a pedagogy through participatory and interactive reading strategy (PAIRS) for Tribhuvan University’s 4th Semester Graduate class of English Literature on the course of ‘Single Author’ (ENG 582), by making them engaged in dialogues, both in oral and written form, in which they will share and exchange their ideas on literary texts of Toni Morrison by investigating on some specific implications of the author’s vision…

Women's contribution to the growth and development of human civilization has always been great. Black women in white cultures are generally assigned stereotyped roles. African American literature has examined the problem of racial discrimination in all its philosophical, existential and epistemological aspects. The development of African American Women's fiction is a mirror-image of the intensity of the relationship between sexism and racism in America. Black women used their writing as a platform to champion the causes of their entire sister women. Their writings paved the path for emancipation of their lot. The paper will further discuss about the role of women writers right from to the time of slavery to contemporary to uplift their community and expose the harsh realities through their pen.

- by Dr. Ambreen Kharbe
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- Art
- by Myra Ikram
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- Art, Scientific Publications
- by Bassant Ayman Ahmed Abdil Alim
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- by Karoline Rindstad
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- Psychology, Narrative, Empathy, Eng

Regarded as a state of servitude through which an individual or a group of persons is compelled to work their guts out without any possibility to get compensated or rewarded, slavery, for some centuries, had been implemented under various forms from one country to another. From the antiquity to the twentieth century, thralldom had been a profitable business that gangrened the African continent. Thus being, African and African American thinkers shoulder the mission to dust archives and lift the curtain of history to retell and re-narrate the episode of drudgery; among them Leonoa Miano and Toni Morrison. The purpose of this article is to examine the trauma of slavery from a comparative, matrifocal and afrocentred perspective so as to highlight commonalities and differences between Leonora Miano's La Saison de l'ombre and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Inspired by the infamous history of slavery, these two award-winning novels not only conjure up the ordeal of slavery, but they also catalyze its haunting memory for the sake of healing, so that both characters and readers could be cleansed off its tantalizing grip and achieve catharsis and redemption. For this end, La Saison de l'ombre and Beloved are woven around feminine counter-narratives that exhibit counter-memories which are often glossed over or overlooked in both African and Euro-American phallocentric official narratives. Through a comparative approach, we spotlighted the whole process of slavery, from the captivity in Africa to enslavement in America.

Toni Morrison was a pivotal figure in portraying Afro-American societies' past traumas and narratives. Morrison portrayed all the tragedies, traumatic experiences, and abuses that the populations endured as slaves and exiles through the traumatic stories of the characters, Morrison sought to shed light on the traumatic history, through the traumatic stories of the characters. Morrison depicted all the horrors, traumas, and atrocities that the communities faced as slavery and exiles. Using the principles of trauma, this article tries to concentrate on collective trauma, post-memory, slavery, and exile, as well as how enslaved and displaced communities try to survive from traumas under their experiences. It also aims to demonstrate the importance of Collective Trauma, Post-traumatic stress, and collective trauma in the lives of communities having to suffer the horrific conditions of slavery and exile.

- by arunakumari s
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- Trauma Studies

The Cardinal objective of this analysis is an exploration of the Survival Consciousness and Justice as a dominant concern in Toni Morrison's novel Tar Baby (1981). Generally, in the context of the discriminatory practices and segregation of the blacks by the whites, blacks resorted to varied strategies to sustain their existence among the whites. This paper examines how the white hegemony instils in the black survival, the desire for the magic white touch or even a seductive life. In total oblivion of their black cultural roots, Morrison outlines how the black woman is seen struggling to achieve her 'alien dreams' which were subtly ingrained in her. In addition, the novel is also an appropriate example of how the blacks accepted subordination for their survival. Another major achievement of Morrison in the novel is the exploration of the possibilities of a fulfilling man-woman relationship in the background of race and culture. By placing her novel in the ambience of two almost simultaneous movements, "Black is Beautiful" and "The Woman Liberation Movement", Morrison continues to probe the issue of meaningful survival and coexistence. The survival pangs of nature amid rampant exploitation and juxtaposed with the issue of the survival of black culture. Toni Morrison also depicts the struggle between nature and civilisation as a metaphor for the struggle between Black and White cultures. The quest for identity is tortured in the body, mind and spirit, and the black woman's struggles in a world where gender discrimination is not a deviation but a norm. Yet the characters reach their fullest potential and development within the boundaries of their community. Thus, from an overall perspective, this exploration carefully examines the impact of these racial differences on the survival process and the search for female subjectivity.

- by Dr G M Joseph Dunston
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- Social Justice, Diaspora Studies, Gender Discrimination, Survival
- by vaishali anand
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- American Studies, English Literature, Art, Human Rights

Toni Morrison's Beloved from an intersectional perspective "You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know." (Wilberforce, William. 1791) Toni Morrison's Beloved is set around the time of abolition... more

- by Elisabet Corlin
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- American Literature, English Literature, History of Slavery

While thinking about transgenerational ghosting, even before I had a term to represent my thoughts, my point of reference was my phobia of prisons. Yes, the very idea of prisons frightens me beyond belief; therefore, I don‟t break the law. I have an aversion to federal court buildings, police departments, prison movies, prison scenes within other movies, people confined to chain-gangs, people in handcuffs, I distrust the police, and the list continues. When I realized that others don‟t categorically share my fear, I started to wonder about the source of it. I wondered, “Do prisons frighten me because my ancestors were enslaved? Do I remember, somehow, that feeling of insurmountable captivity? Do bodies remember?” Apparently, my questions did not exist in isolation; others had been investigating this notion as well. Toni Morrison provides an evocative perception of the notion of freedom, and its lack, in the foreword to her critically acclaimed novel, Beloved. She provides a personal...

- by Dr. Sonya McCoy-Wilson
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- American Fiction, English language and literature, TONI, Morrison
- by David V Gonzalez
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- Art
- by Scot Hinson
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- History, Narrative, Literary studies
- by Ranjit Maniktala
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In the current context of the proliferation of neo-slave narratives, Lorene Cary’s The Price of a Child (1995) strikes a rather singular tone. With its title explicitly echoing Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Cary’s novel and its straightforward realism come as a surprise. As this close intertextual reading of the two novels intends to show, beyond expressing a probable anxiety of influence, Cary’s narrative appears to revise major tenets of the African American ethos on which Beloved rests.

- by Claude Le Fustec
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- Philosophy
- by Seongho Yoon
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- Sociology, American Studies, Toni Morrison, Masquerade

A B S T R A C T
A close look at Toni Morrison’s novels makes the readers wonder about having so many unexplained riddles. One of these foggy ideas is having several contrastive ideas in her novel Beloved (1987). Some of these ideas would make sense with deep explanations, while others need to have a constructive examination to be scrutinized and then criticized. Using text analysis, this paper traces the contrasting ideas in Morrison’s Beloved and lists them according to their literary significance and relevance to the understanding of the reader. Then it explains how such contrasts interfere and collide with the normal, and for what reasons the author presents them in such a way, are the questions of this paper around which the discussion revolves. This study definitively answers the question regarding the correlation between the contrasting ideas in the novel and the implied messages that the author wants to deliver. It also shows how
artistic and creative the author was in presenting these ideas. According to the author, Beloved is not just a story to pass by, but one needs to understand every thread and clue it offers. Accordingly, it is the novel that could provide an insightful understanding of the conditions of subalterns of African-Americans and their trek to survive during stories such as Beloved that lasts for generations.

Within psychodynamic approach frame, this study examines African-American modern novelist Toni
Morrison's philosophy towards generally human behavior, and American individual's in particular. It
explores Morrison's craft in fictionalizing story fabric that is truly inspired from Freudian myth of ego. By
Unprecedented Beloved (1987), with prizes winner- crafted pen, Morrison lures readers to trace
psychodynamic role of ego with its people's, of what this ego puts forth for hopefully finding adequate
solutions, , though temporarily, through striking a bargain, and making peace with their forces, namely
unconscious . Beloved's people believe, as Freud does, that their behaviors are an output done, not by
autonomous ego, but rather to be by an integral relationship of ego—unconscious structure since the later
has a powerful influence to which their egos never resist.
Functioned itself a messenger of what Morrison wants to send, this study echoes Morrison's very urgent
messages to deliver readers that time has come to depart conventional argument , yet to adopt modernistic
style ,within helpful psychological , that highly depicts concept, like slavery , for urban behavior of modern
individual. Furthermore these messages, ideologized by Freudian dogma, offer procedural solutions ;
through holding conciliation in term of individual as effective as societal to rectify what distorted history
has committed in prejudicially stereotyping such a community for which as long as a policy of the white
majority has been rumoring .

- by Dr. Mohammed H A Q I Al-Azzawi
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By the noun ‗name', we generally refer it to as a set of words by which a person or a thing is known and addressed. On the other hand, ‗naming' is the process of assigning a name to somebody by someone else. In this context, this research study undertakes to exemplify how names and naming of the characters play a crucial role in Morrison's novel Beloved. Primarily, it is a story told through memories and flashbacks, a supernatural tale about a slain daughter who comes back to life. Then it is a love story about two people who find one another after nearly twenty years have passed. And it is also a familial tale about three generations of women whose lives are still affected by the institution of slavery. While these are many aspects of Beloved that could be argued as important within the context of the novel, the one that has been focussed on here is the act of naming or nicknaming as a way of reclaiming one's self and one's identity.

- by Ritushmita Sharma
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- by Keith Byerman
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- American Literature, Literary studies

Reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Paradise and A Mercy through the lens of Bakhtin reveals identity construction as a dialogic endeavour. While this method may be necessary for character development, it serves the further purpose of making an ethical case for the self’s responsibility to others. This paper considers key theoretical instruments, as enabled by Bakhtin, in relation to Morrison’s treatment of naming and other character constructing elements. It is ultimately Morrison’s construction of identity as dialogical which enables the argument that Morrison’s fiction offers an ethics in the interest of the other. Writing about the marginalised, the abused and the voiceless reveals Morrison’s oeuvre is unmistakably an ongoing engagement with the injustice of slavery and its political, economic, social and psychological aftermath. The relevance of this article lies in its analysis of Morrison’s fiction as an antidote which challenges the self’s “self-interest”, which is ...

- by Vida de Voss
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- Sociology, Dialogic