The Bluest Eye Research Papers (original) (raw)

Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) stands as an outstanding novel of character regarding the destroying effects of Negrophobia among the black on themselves. Pecola Breedlove's agony over blue eyes arises from an undeveloped Negritude, the discord within the black society towards Negrophobia, and a strong fear of her own race. Pecola's non-reconciliation with her black identity, inflamed by domestic violence and the black societal indifference, craves for blue eyes, the paradigm of whiteness and white beauty. Consequently, she develops an anti-black neurosis because of a feeling of nonexistence both within her community and the white society, although she remains entangled within the interstitial space of blackness and whiteness as in a purgatory of suffering. Her final madness is the culmination of a black human being who is able neither to accept and defend her Negritude, nor to transcend to a seemingly higher, but fake, state of being.

- by Mohammad-Javad Haj'jari and +1
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- Race and Ethnicity, Ethnicity, Toni Morrison, Race
- by Christopher Douglas
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- Sociology, Multiculturalism, Black Arts Movement, Toni Morrison

A THEMATIC STUDY ON TONI MORRISON'S BLUEST EYE

- by VIFIL VIJAY. V .F
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- Toni Morrison (Literature), The Bluest Eye, Novel Analysis
- by Bronwyn Hoskins-Davies
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- English Literature, Literature, Womanism, Toni Morrison (Literature)
- by N Hamidah O
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- English Literature, Literature, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

{Jaede Shillingford, McGill University} As scholars of English Literature, or even casual observers of the craft, we have long understood the works of woman authors—Austen, Woolf, Brontë and all their equally inclined colleagues—to be intrinsic cornerstones of feminist literary thought. This is not necessarily because the women centered in this fiction were any less marginalized by oppressive hegemonic ideology than the minds from which they came, but rather, the importance of these authors within the canon stems from the boundaries they broke simply through their courageous wielding of the pen.

- by The Foundationalist and +1
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- Black feminism, Toni Morrison, Literary Analysis, The Bluest Eye

This contribution investigates and lays bare the ideological workings of racialized beauty myth as presented in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye by bringing together feminist theory and postcolonial theory of race. It demonstrates that racialized beauty norms are informed by both the constructs of gender and race, and that they serve as a tool of social positioning and social control in Western capitalist patriarchies. This kind of contextual understanding, which Morrison’s The Bluest Eye helps to foster on a number of structurally interlocked levels, is also of crucial importance for the understanding of the way beauty myth operates today in the context of globally exported Western beauty industry. Its basic tenets remain firmly rooted in the construction and perpetuation of racialized and gendered otherness, which is why The Bluest Eye remains an eye-opener and therefore a novel of lasting value for readers in general and, as this contribution demonstrates, for students of English literature in particular.

- by Lilijana Burcar
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- Gender, Capitalism, Racism, Toni Morrison (Literature)

Toni Morrison’s novels are deeply rooted in and committed to place. Perched on the distinction between fact and truth, her work relies on truth to recover a subjectivity that is often cut away from fact. In Beloved, while we are aware of the facts of Sethe’s escape, we are asked to instead pay attention to Sethe’s subjective memory of it, her private familiarity with pain, her intimacy with Amy’s “breath like burning wood”. (Morrison, 2004, 92). In this way, using the ‘magical’ to conjure up something more real and whole than fact, Morrison similarly transforms the settings of her novels into something fuller than an address, writing the emotional truth of a place onto its physical landscape. Where other writers use setting as a physical backdrop, a stage, I argue that Morrison builds place with intimacy, paying attention to its corners and folds, giving it not only a name but a persona. In this essay, I will explore how Morrison represents landscapes as places of intimacy in The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise, uplifting the interior experiences of black women through narration in order to render place and community as subjective rather than objective. Portraying places with an intimacy that elevates subjectivity over fact, her settings are never indifferent or separate from the lives that they contain. In fact, they are interested and entwined.

- by Naomi Rokotnitz
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- Embodied Cognition, Narrative Methods, Affect Studies, Postmodern Literature

Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) depicts the hideous effects of Euro-American discourse presented by various media on the life of African Americans. In her agonizing narrative, she dramatizes the operation of white-dominated media especially Hollywood movies in reinforcing the discourse of the blue-eyed, and confirming their racial superiority by spreading the “sequences of signs” that signify their “modalities of existence”. It is argued here that this process indicates the operation of a panoptic mechanism that controls blacks’ mindset and behavior almost in the same way that the supervisor of Behtham’s Panopticon’s central tower does, according to Foucault, with the difference that the controlling agent of this system is set in the wide-spread American media. Morrison portrays in a touching way how that system molds blacks’ state of mind, affects their feelings and induces a bitter sense of inferiority among them. Her novel relates the story of a poor black girl who suffers from the sense of ugliness and inferiority because of being black and finally goes mad, for the reason that American media permanently presents an image of beauty whose components are white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair – the very signs she lacks.

- by Sima Farshid
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- Discourse, Control, Media, Toni Morrison

The Malayalam paper published in MRJ in Jan 2017 is a critical explication of Afro American literature as a post colonial and new contemporary literature with liberative potentials in the Asian African world like India especially in pedagogy and social democracy. The emergence of slave narratives and Afro American fiction as a critique of the WASP writing and dominant culture is elaborated with examples drawn from the new dynamic canon created through life struggles and literary battles by Morrison, Baldwin and others. The legacies of Martin Luther to Malcom X are also critically explored in theoretical and ethical subtleties and with a keen accent on critical consciousness.

If “here and everywhere you go” one can overhear a voice singing the blues to ease a “troublin’ mind,” as Boweavil insists in my epigram, then the blues offer Ellison a universal foundation in his own tradition upon which to construct a secular response to Unamunan Christian existentialism, a response less mediated by French atheistic existentialism than Sartrean readings of Invisible Man imply. (Interdisciplinary Humanities - Vol. 23 - Issue 2 - 2006 - pp. 7-18).

- by Chauncey Ridley
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- American Literature, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Music

Este trabajo se centra en explorar el papel de la mujer afroamericana en la literatura, la teoría y la crítica literaria estadounidense. A su vez, se encarga de explorar las relaciones de estas disciplinas con el pensamiento feminista negro y las manifestaciones culturales surgidas de las mismas. Desarrollada una introducción de la teoría feminista negra y de la literatura afroamericana de mujeres, se realiza un análisis comparatista de dos obras fundamentales del Segundo Renacimiento Negro: The Bluest Eye (1970) de Toni Morrison y The Color Purple (1982) de Alice Walker para reflexionar sobre en qué medida la literatura y el pensamiento feminista se influyen entre sí.

- by Joaquín Saravia
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- African American Literature, Literary Theory, Black feminism, Toni Morrison
- by CRSTINA AGOPIAN
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- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Ideal Beuty

The first 'unified field theory' of multicultural literature, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism is a literary history of how we arrived at our current paradigm of writing, reading and teaching multicultural literature in the United States. It hypothesizes a three-phase development for multicultural literature from the 1920s to the 1980s, uncovering the largely unacknowledged role that social science ideas played in nourishing the politics and forms of the most canonical writers in the African American, Asian American, Mexican American and Native American traditions. A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism challenges the critical consensuses on the four traditions that treat each in terms of separate histories, a critical practice that has obscured the parallel phases of each tradition and the common cultural politics that generated multiculturalism's rupture with the non-pluralist literary politics that came before it.

- by Christopher Douglas
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- Sociology, Multiculturalism, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity

{Bailey A. Moskowitz, University of Virginia} In this paper, I will first
illuminate how Morrison’s writing suggests artistic expression as a way for individuals
to realize their identities. I will then investigate how other authors depict Morrison’s theory of self-realization, thereby exploring how the production and dissemination of
art can serve as both healing means of expression and as forces capable of isolating the artist.

- by The Foundationalist
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- Art Therapy, Trauma, Toni Morrison (Literature), Literary Analysis

“Everything is not what it seems.” One of many lessons ingrained in us as developing teenagers. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the importance of the echoing “life tip” is deeply stressed and Mr. Henry, a character we are slowly starting to see more of, is one way Morrison emphasizes this point. Character development and foreshadowing are two techniques used to portray this point through Mr. Henry.

- by Aiko O Z Alvarez-Gibson
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- Symbolism, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Mr. Henry in The Bluest Eye

This paper deals with an analysis of the representations of trauma and violence in two works of contemporary African-American literature: Toni Morrison’s fiction The Bluest Eye, and Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Both works deal with coming of age stories of black girls in the segregated United States, covering topics such as rape, racism, sexism and poverty. Violence takes many shapes in these stories, such as the beauty patterns defined by a white-supremacist culture, the way a segregated society operated institutionally backing up racism, and finally sexual violence on an infant body. This work tries to better understand the ways in which structural violence (Galtung) contributes to the perpetuation of violence and trauma in the experiences of black women in the United States. As well as trying to understand the role of trauma representations as a means for the overcoming of the traumatic event.

- by Gonçalo Cholant
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- Toni Morrison, Literatura Afro-Americana, Violência, The Bluest Eye

- by Joaquín Saravia
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- African American Literature, Literary Theory, Black feminism, Toni Morrison