Morrison Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Top Papers
Most Cited Papers
Most Downloaded Papers
Newest Papers
People
- by
- •
- Ajedrez, Curso, Morrison, Chandler

This study is an attempt to examine Toni Morrison's two novels Beloved (1987) and Home (2012) based on Frantz Fanon's theory of "psycho-politics" in which he combines politics with psychology. The main focus has been on examining the effect of colonization on blacks physically and mentally. Black people are haunted by harsh memories from their past and thus they find it difficult to recover from the influence of the colonization. Traumatic past, consciousness, violence, and alienation are going to be discussed as results of slavery. Therefore, this paper will investigate slaves and their masters in order to clarify the experience of slavery. The harshness of the blacks' actions are based on psychological suppression of their past. Fanon's work provides awareness into the psychology of colonial oppression in dehumanized and oppressed communities. His criticism is interpreted through the understanding of power, violence and subordination and thus he examined the character of the black man or woman through the system of values in the white culture. Therefore, Fanon brings "politics into psychology" and "psychology into Politics" by analyzing power within a series of psycho-analytical conceptions.

- by Arab World English Journal (AWEJ)
- •
- Post-Colonialism, Home, Beloved, Morrison
- by Anna Głąb
- •
- Narrative, Reader, Ethics of Reading, Morrison

This paper utilizes poststructuralist theory to investigate the polysemic nature of the eponymous character Beloved in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The ghostly, anachronistic presence of Beloved renders the text open to multiple interpretations and this essay sets out to explore the ways in which meaning is created and communicated. From a poststructuralist perspective, considering that the meaning is in a state of flux, a text weaves its system of meaning around an assumed center in order to provide so-called stability. Peripheral meanings are repressed by the center to secure the meaning system. However, the periphery, which has a constructive function in the organization of the text, also has the deconstructive potential. Hence, the deconstructive dynamics are already inherent in the text. In Beloved, Toni Morrison addresses, among other things, the act of speaking the unspeakable and the process of constructing a new subjectivity out of the ghost of the past. Her text deconstructs the dominant narratives that have marginalized the black motherhood experience, explores the horrors of slavery through horror elements, and eventually exposes the inadequacy of language to depict such horrors. While the textual periphery is enabled to speak louder than the center, the textual subconscious flows freely. The reader is forced to participate actively in meaning-making in order to make sense of the fragmented narrative imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Beloved, as the abject other, defies the phallogocentric symbolic order. A counter-discourse emerges from the maternal, semiotic chora and empowers the otherized heroine Sethe to construct her subjectivity. Delving into the interrelationship between traumatic memory and the act of creating one’s own narrative, the text finds reparative elements in ancestral connection and thereby blends the psychological with the historical and the micro-level with the macro-level of meaning. This paper employs deconstructive key concepts from Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytic key concepts from Julia Kristeva, and seeks to unravel the dynamics in Morrison’s text that enable Beloved to be read polysemically

- by Eva Yigit
- •
- Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Slavery, Derrida