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

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- African American Literature, T.S. Eliot, Toni Morrison, The Waste Land
- by Chloe L Sell
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- American Literature, Sexual Violence, African American Literature, Cultural Memory

À mi-chemin entre philosophie morale et métaphysique de la liberté, cet essai se propose de méditer la possibilité d’une « éthique de la conviction » pour notre temps, et de réinventer ses coordonnées en la liant de manière indissoluble à la question du « monde ». Plaidant pour un universalisme de la réécriture et de la traduction perpétuelles, la réflexion menée dans ces pages utilise les ressorts de la fiction et de la narration, mobilise les mémoires de l’esclavage et du colonialisme, et investit la thématique de la catastrophe, afin de restituer au sujet moral une puissance d’invention et de création dans et pour le monde commun, là-même où le premier fait l’épreuve mélancolique d’une perte de sens abyssale. Tout au long d’un parcours exigeant qui nous entraine de la philosophie kantienne et fichtéenne au cinéma dramatique de Jeff Nichols, en passant par la tragédie de Heinrich von Kleist, le roman lyrique de Toni Morrison et le roman grotesque de Sony Labou Tansi, l’essai cartographie à nouveaux frais l’expérience vécue, pathique, d’une volonté inconditionnelle, et à proprement parler « folle », de liberté dans et pour un monde en droit habitable et partageable. Il situe son enquête – et ses propositions – dans l’aller-retour entre la liberté problématique, voire catastrophique, du sujet, et l’horizon indéterminé du monde, sous la menace constante de l’aliénation ou même de la privation de l’une et de l’autre.

- by Augustin Dumont
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- Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Literature, Slavery

{Ashley Little, Franklin and Marshall College} Notions of mothering, nurturing, and providing are often equated with the "nature" of women. This "nature" designation conflates biological function with expression, thus restricting women to... more

Written in 2014, my senior thesis explores permutations in visions of skin and embodiment within works by U.S.-based women of color (Theresa Cha, Toni Morrison, Beyoncé Knowles). Drawing on queer, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory as well as continental philosophy, my project examines the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of this fluctuating corporeality within discourses of U.S. racialization.

- by sky Khoo
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- Psychoanalysis, Race and Ethnicity, Continental Philosophy, Psychoanalysis And Race

La lingua che ospita, in questa nuova edizione, pluralizza le coordinate-guida della riflessione indicate nel sottotitolo (Poetiche, politiche, traduzioni), ponendosi come strumento di interrogazione della mobilità transfrontaliera. Deterritorializzazione, contaminazione, creolità, de-colonizzazione, traduzione, trasformazione sono i territori costitutivi di questa narrativa, nella consapevolezza che i punti nodali toccati nella prima edizione – la diaspora, il border crossing, le transculturazioni, le lingue perdute e le lingue nuove/impure, la subalternità e la resistenza, la creatività, l’attivismo socio-culturale e la border art transatlantica – sono ancora essenziali per l’esplorazione delle pratiche neo-coloniali che inducono l’attuale mobilità lungo rotte mediterranee. La proposta teorico-critico-performativa di questa indagine è la smobilitazione delle demarcazioni dei confini geo-politici ed artistici con pratiche di border critical thinking. Il concetto occidentale di mappa è smontato per delineare le geo-corpo-grafie della creatività artistica e della mobilità senza frontiere che decolonizzano la normatività critica, gli steccati disciplinari e la geopolitica del respingimento lungo le frontiere di qualsivoglia mappa-mondo.

- by Paola Zaccaria
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- Translation Studies, Migration mobilities, Hospitality Studies, Virginia Woolf

How can we relate the quantitative presence of literary artifacts to their ability to make a difference, and how does the problem of scale define public accounts of what can be considered relevant literary value? The idea of a singular space of reception (one literary "market-place," say, or one "public sphere") is unhelpful. Rather, literary artifacts have potentially multiple social lives that differ in their relation to "sacralized" and "everyday" practices. An aesthetic object can thrive in many simultaneous or successive practice spaces that use and value it differently and that embed it in differing sites of authority. Moving from the Romantic period to the present, this article looks at the trajectories of Walter Scott as an earlier and Toni Morrison as a recent candidate for culturally relevant authorship.

- by Günter Leypoldt
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- Literary Canon, Toni Morrison, Sir Walter Scott
- by Lars Eckstein
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- Postcolonial Studies, African American Studies, Toni Morrison, John Coltrane

Attached are a Table of Contents and a downloadable link for The VOICE of the CHILD in American Literature, written by MARY JANE HURST and published by the University of Kentucky Press in 1990. The first book-length study of the child figure in American fiction, The Voice of the Child was a finalist for the Children’s Literature Association’s annual book award.

- by Mary Jane Hurst
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- American Literature, Literary Stylistics, Willa Cather, William Faulkner
- by Gurumurthy Neelakantan and +1
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- Toni Morrison

Restrained Female Bodies: The Relationship between the Imagery of "Grotesque" and the Disabled Body in "Recitatif", Gender and Sexuality, vol.11 (2016).
“Recitatif” (1983) is the only short fiction which has been written by Toni Morrison. This story consists of the encounters and conversations every few years of two women, Twyla and Roberta, who first met in an orphanage when they were 8 years old. In addition to former research that had been discussed about racial matters, recently some studies have been engaged in analyzing a representation of disabled bodies. The theme of disability (or bodily impairment) in Toni Morrisonʼs works have been deliberated upon her novels. Many of these investigations have been focused on the disabled body as a kind of “grotesque” thing. However, in “Recitatif”, the imagery of grotesqueness is given not to just the orphanageʼs kitchen woman, Maggie, who is supposed to physically and mentally disabled, but also the other characters. These are older girls (“big girls”) in the orphanage, who are called “gar girls” by Twyla and Roberta. The nickname of “gar girls” comes from “gargoyle”, a character that has a grotesque figure. It is supposed that they have an able body. Consequently, there is a more complicated relationship than the premise that connects grotesqueness and the disabled body as a straight one. Therefore, in this paper, I would like to reconsider the relationship between grotesqueness and disabled body.
Maggie and big girls / gar girls appear in Twyla and Robertaʼs reminiscences of the orphanage which they talk about in almost every encounter. Twyla and Roberta firstly call older girls as “big girls”, and in a certain point of this talk, they change it to “gar girls”. In this essay, I want to focus on this change of nicknames in order to reexamine the relationship. Focusing on it means to analyze the process of giving grotesqueness to not grotesque one at the beginning of this story. First, what happens in this change will be addressed. We will find the meaning of the imagery of “grotesque” as a sense of evil and sexual deviance in this story. Then, the meaning of this change will be explained. We will know the situation that Twyla and Roberta overcome a kind of threat by they became older than big girls. Thirdly, what Twyla and Roberta are doing in this change, especially how they are related to Maggie, will be examined. It will be show that comprehending this change is crucial for Twyla and Roberta to protect themselves against Maggie as a kind of danger. As a consequence, we will appreciate the failure of Twyla and Robertaʼs attempt to guard themselves from the danger of Maggie. Finally, through investigating the meaning of this failure, the relationship between the grotesqueness and the disabled body will be elucidated. To conclude, it will find the fact that the possibility of the disabled body differs from the imagery of the grotesque in “Recitatif”.

- by Mai Igarashi
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- American Literature, Disability Studies, Toni Morrison

In what follows, I bring two "loose cannons"-Jacques Derrida and Toni Morrison-into conversation with one another. In doing so, I hope to sketch what their critical theories might bring to bear on "The Western Canon." This essay is not simply concerned with the texts that make up this canon (or those which are denied admittance) but, rather, with our very relationship to the concept of canon. How does this relationship situate our reading of texts, our formulating of curricula, and-to the central question of this conference-our advocacy for diversity in higher education? In pursuit of these questions, I attempt to break away from any canon debate that would be con ned to "the advocacy of diversi cation within the canon and/or a kind of benign coexistence near or within reach of the already sacred texts." 2 This project arose from my encounter with Toni Morrison's Whiteness and the Literary Imagination while I was a student in the Torrey Honors Institute (a "Great Books" program at Biola University). Morrison helped me realize that I'd been caught up in some common presumptions about the supposed transcendence of canonical (often whitemale-authored) texts. I found that-even while I was thinking about my own blackness 3 in relation to the African-American literary tradition-I was gravitating towards the explicitly political texts of W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and others. Morrison's profound attention to detail (particularly on matters of race) in the texts of Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, and Willa Cather clearly opens up new (and faithful) interpretations. She also reveals how avoidance of "race matters" only constrains and constricts the meaning of 1 Naas, Taking on the Tradition , xvii. 2 Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken , 135. 3 "When matters of race are located and called attention to in American literature, critical response has tended to be on the order of a humanistic nostrum-or a dismissal mandated by the label 'political'" ( Morrison, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , 12).

- by Jason Stephens
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- Critical Theory, History, Literature, Higher Education

Beauty is an abstract idea with no specific definition and dimension, yet it intrinsically moves the entire person 'spirit and heart, intelligence and reason, creative capacity and imagination.' One's perception of beauty is to a large extent based on one's cultural identity. But with the passage of time, standards of beauty have changed, disfiguring the cultural identity and causing chaos and confusion. In India and Africa, people still adopt white standards of beauty. Though these colonized countries are freed and emancipated, their psyche is yet to be decolonized and restored to their original selves. Is it not true that the malaise lies with imperialism? Imperialism is such a destructive political ideology that it not only exploited the economic resources of occupied lands but also destroyed the cultural identities of the subjugated population to perpetuate the regime. Hence, this paper focuses on how imperialism impacted the standards of beauty and analyze vario...

- by Zainab Suhaibani
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- Mythology, English Literature, Literature, Colonialism

With the outbreak of World War I, being a soldier offered an opportunity for
black males to acquire black manhood in America’s segregated society.
Investigating black soldiers and war veterans in Sula, men who have always been
perceived as peripheral and minor characters, could offer a promising direction in
Morrison criticism for constructing a positive black image. Therefore, this paper
seeks to explore the black WWI veteran characters in Sula Shadrack, in
particular from his dreadful experience on the battlefield in France to his return
to the Bottom, and examines the meaning of his existence in the black community
along with his declaration of National Suicide Day. Through his war experience,
Shadrack gains the power to recognize his damaged sense of identity as a black
man, and, rather than being devastated by this experience, he undertakes to heal
the wounded black identity by establishing an ingenious, communal ritual,
National Suicide Day, which connects the cultural and historical identity of the
Bottom’s people with one’s individual black identity. The ritual makes him a
creator, a healer, and most of all, a leader in the Bottom. He also tries to heal a
young black girl, the protagonist Sula, by soothing her fears. This relationship
between Shadrack and Sula presents and represents a strongly positive aspect of
him as a more affirmative black male figure than any other black male characters
in Morrison’s novels have been shown to be. Through these analyses, this paper
aims to focus upon the complex, problematic status of black male characters in
Morrison’s novels and to supplement their limited and negative evaluation with a
more positive one by drawing attention to Shadrack.

- by Set-Byul Moon
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- Gender Studies, English language, English, African American Literature
- by Susana Morris
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- Friendship, Toni Morrison, Interracial Friendship, Recitatif
- by Valérie Loichot
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- Family studies, Narrative, Southern Studies (U.S. South), Caribbean Literature
- by Keren Omry
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- Jazz Studies, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin
- by Marcos Antonio Norris
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- Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Feminist Theory, Film Studies

In her novel Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison uses the motif of shoes repetitively. Based on this, I argue in my article entitled "From Feet to Wings: The Importance of Being Bare-Footed in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon" that in her use of the shoe motif, Morrison departs from many Western folktales where more often than not shoes entail power and transformation. Morrison's subversion of the shoe metaphor underlines the magical and transformative power her characters become endowed with once they step out of their shoes. This becomes significant since when feet become liberated from shoes, characters like Pilate and Milkman-who I focus onlearn how to sing and learn how to redraw the physical map of their ancestors. As a result, their bare feet transform into wings and they fly. The theoretical frameworks I draw upon in my article are Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject and Freud's analysis of the sexual significance of shoes and flight. These theoretical frameworks combined highlight the inseparable connection between shoes, maps, and flight. Space, time, and the self converge with the result of offering a new perspective. Shoes, I maintain, represent space and largely inform gender and identity throughout the novel. Critics writing on Morrison's novel focus separately on the metaphors of shoes, flight, and singing. What my article offers is a comprehensive view that connects these motifs together in conjunction to maps. My paper also traces the transformation from feet to wings and examines it against the background of the western tradition. Thus, my article brings a new reading to Morrison's Song of Solomon in particular and to African American literature in general that synthesizes several motifs previously considered separately, and adds a new dimension to the gendering of space.

- by Sally Abed
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- Slavery, Toni Morrison, American Litearture, Afro-American Literature
- by Ross Poole
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- Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Memory Studies, Collective Memory, Collective Memory
- by Ross Poole
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- Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Memory Studies, Collective Memory, Collective Memory

This essay reads Jacques Derrida and Toni Morrison side by side, with a view to meditating on the meaning (or non-meaning) of the secret, and exploring literature’s symbiotic relationship with secrecy. Reading a series of Derrida’s and Morrison’s works related to the topic of “the secret,” which include Derrida’s “Responding to/Answering for:
The Secret” (1991b), “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering’” (1992) and “Literature in Secret” (1999b); and Morrison’s “A Knowing So Deep” (1985), Playing in the Dark (1992), her Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993) and “The Future of Time” (1996), I argue that secrecy does not pose an epistemic obstacle or hermeneutic limit to either Morrison or Derrida.
Rather, comparing the process of literary creation to “playing in the dark,” Morrison finds in the darkness of the secret a threshold time-space of literary “becoming,” while Derrida explicitly advocates the idea that literature is “in place of the secret” or literature “responds to the secret” in order to drive forward a future dimension of avenir. Derrida is concerned about a secret that hides nothing, a secret without depth. For him, literature is capable of keeping (the life of) the secret not because literature has to conceal knowledge but because “literarity” makes literature as unfathomable and elusive as the secret in relationship to meaning. Contentions like these find strong resonance in Morrison’s works. Indeed, both Morrison and Derrida seek in “the secret” the force to cut open existing cognitive systems; both also consider literary practices valuable as long as these practices are able to ride on the cognitive opening of the secret for generating movement from the
edge of knowledge.

- by Hsiu-chuan Lee
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- Literary Theory, Jacques Derrida, Toni Morrison
- by Sathyaraj Venkatesan
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- Toni Morrison

ABSTRACT
Previous critical readings of Toni Morrison’s novels, especially Paradise, largely emphasise the universal themes
explored in her novels, namely, feminism, culture, psychology, and of course, her remarkable presentation of
African-Americans in racial and cultural conflicts. Yet, there are major areas that remain unexplored in her
works. One of the most conspicuous absences is Morrison’s dominance over the art of narration. Narratology,
as a science, studies the ways in which narration and narrators help us shape our perceptions of reality,
cultural artifacts, clichés, etc. Needless to say, it is Morrison’s ceaseless dominance and control over the art
of narration that take her novels, including Paradise, to a new level and style - a modern style, which Roland
Barthes refers to as the “writerly text.” By setting the science of narration as the cornerstone of this paper, the
following notions will receive a proper narratological definition: (a) how the various stories, initially narrated
by unrelated characters are juxtaposed against each other to convey a single plot/storyline, and (b) how a
singular omniscient/omnipresent narrator is unable to lead the narrative towards a satisfactory ending. To investigate the significance of utilising a labyrinthine narrative form in modern texts, this paper studies the
variety and relevance of the employed forms of narration, through the interdisciplinary science of narratology.

- by Shahriyar Mansouri
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- American Literature, Narratology, Toni Morrison

In the novel Paradise, the final book in her trilogy, Morrison opens the novel in a large kitchen located in a convent in Ruby, Oklahoma. Ruby, named after the one citizen who died in the town, was created with the intention to keep the black heritage alive and rid the town of their white predecessor's of the neighboring town of Haven. While Haven used to be a "haven," a place where neighbors shared gossip next to the community oven, Ruby is small, with no hotels nor even a drugstore. The same car that is a hearse is also used as the ambulance; either delivering the nearly dead or recently deceased. The community oven, which was brought to the town of Ruby brick by brick by the "New Fathers" is no longer used for its original purpose.

At times, Toni Morrison’s Sula reads like a work of folk or epic literature. Pulling from cultural vernacular, as well as from Prof. Chi-Fen Emily Chen summary of “Folk Literature” for the National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology and Prof. Francis Utley’s “Folk Literature: An Operational Definition” for the Journal of American Folklore, this essay will broadly define folk literature as works that invoke mythic or epic imagery—that imagery which amplifies origin/coming of age stories and features characters with unique qualities that push the limits of human capability. This essay will assert that Morrison’s Sula uses folk literature’s mythic imagery to play with readers’ expectations and draw readers’ attention to the weaknesses of binary thinking. The essay will establish two key incidents—the Bottoms’ origin story and Sula’s moment of self-mutilation—as mythic in nature. It will reveal how these mythic events assist language, plot, pacing, mood and tone in the deconstruction of binaries regarding slave relations, strength versus weakness, and character development.

subgenres in speculative fiction. Past-tomorrows and future-yesterdays: Metahistorical Narratives & Scientific Metafictions is a foray into spatial and temporal grids explored by the literary production of the last forty years. Set at the crossroads of several cultural tensions, the metahistorical nature of contemporary narratives and metafictional approaches to scientific discourses in recent fictions problematize concepts of history and practices of science. By means of a radical fragmentation, ramification, and quantification of the plot, the selfreflexivity inherent to metafiction redoubles on a metahistorical hetero-reflexivity. Likewise, the pluridiscursivity inherent to historicity recoils upon the pluridiscursivity of the novel. "this fiction […] portrayed the nature of narrative history rather than the specific facts of historical accounting." Amy J. Elias "the most arresting, ambitious, and significant fiction written in English in the past four or five decades is, in this way, metahistorical: it summons, fractures, and re-invents history." Susan Strehle "extensive engagement with 'real' history and fictional supplement demonstrates how abstract notation systems (fictions) are complexly embedded in materiality." Sherryl Vint

- by Giuseppe Episcopo
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- Cyberpunk, Thomas Pynchon, Sigmund Freud, Steampunk

Toni Morrison’s third novel Song of Solomon (1977) acts as a landmark in her career, since it reveals the artistic maturity she has gained, and also presents the solution she has discerned to solve the devastating problems she portrays in her first traumatizing novel The Bluest Eye (1970). To resist the mortifying effects of the dominant discourse depicted in her first novel, Morrison’s third novel encourages her fellow African Americans to unearth their roots and cherish their cultural African heritage by making her protagonist excavate the history of his family, and thereby the myths of African slaves, to comprehend his true identity. Moreover the most appealing character she portrays in the novel is a gracious, affectionate woman who has preserved the values and traditions of her ancestors in the heart of modern America, and also acts as the guardian and guide of her nephew, the protagonist of the novel. The strange name of this custodian of ancestral values and its multiple implications signify the priority Morrison has given to names and naming in the novel. In addition to the alluding name of the title, the most indicative names are the first names of the protagonist and his aunt and also their family name, besides some notable names which expose the resistance of the black against the dominant white – all investigated in detail in this article.

- by Sima Farshid
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- Toni Morrison, Resistance, Naming, African Americans

With the outbreak of World War I, being a soldier offered an opportunity for black males to acquire black manhood in America’s segregated society. Investigating black soldiers and war veterans in Sula, men who have always been perceived as peripheral and minor characters, could offer a promising direction in Morrison criticism for constructing a positive black image. Therefore, this paper seeks to explore the black WWI veteran characters in Sula Shadrack, in particular from his dreadful experience on the battlefield in France to his return to the Bottom, and examines the meaning of his existence in the black community along with his declaration of National Suicide Day. Through his war experience, Shadrack gains the power to recognize his damaged sense of identity as a black man, and, rather than being devastated by this experience, he undertakes to heal the wounded black identity by establishing an ingenious, communal ritual, National Suicide Day, which connects the cultural and historical identity of the Bottom’s people with one’s individual black identity. The ritual makes him a creator, a healer, and most of all, a leader in the Bottom. He also tries to heal a young black girl, the protagonist Sula, by soothing her fears. This relationship between Shadrack and Sula presents and represents a strongly positive aspect of him as a more affirmative black male figure than any other black male characters in Morrison’s novels have been shown to be. Through these analyses, this paper aims to focus upon the complex, problematic status of black male characters in Morrison’s novels and to supplement their limited and negative evaluation with a more positive one by drawing attention to Shadrack.

- by Set Moon
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- Gender Studies, English language, English, African American Literature
- by Ivan Delazari
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- American Literature, American Studies, Narrative, Narratology

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birth-mark" has been interpreted as a story about the duality of human existence, the preference for an idea over a human life, male fears of menstruation and/or female sexuality, the murder of a wife without legal consequences, and even nineteenth-century labor conditions and practices. Despite the striking diversity of these readings, they all agree on one key point: the obsessive nature of Aylmer's reaction to the small crimson mark on Georgiana's otherwise white cheek. Hawthorne's decision to make a birthmark the focus of his story merits careful consideration. In some of his best-known fiction, Hawthorne depicts characters who are separated from other people because particular aspects of their appearance make them unusual. To cite two examples, The Reverend Mr. Hooper in "The Minister's Black Veil" creates an unbridgeable gulf between himself and his congregation by donning a simple piece of black crepe; similarly, in The Scarlet Letter, the Puritan elders decree that Hester Prynne must wear a red A on her breast as a reminder to herself and the community of her sin of adultery. Like Mr. Hooper's veil and Hester's embroidered letter, the small, crimson nevus in the shape of a human hand on Georgiana's face elicits a wide variety of reactions and symbolic interpretations from those who see it. What makes the birthmark noteworthy is that it is not something artificial a person chooses or is forced to wear; rather, it is a permanent part of Georgiana's physiology. Attributable to "an overgrowth of blood vessels," as one encyclopedia puts it, the birthmark on her face is directly connected to Georgiana's blood and all of the significance attached to that word, especially during the antebellum period ("Birthmark").

- by john gruesser
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- Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birthmark, Race in Literature

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

- by David Coughlan
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- Critical Theory, American Literature, Jewish American Literature, American Studies

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 Derek C. Maus
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- Creative Writing, American Literature, Native American Studies, Poetry

Jazz is told by contradictory, multiple narrative voices. Instead of giving the reader one omniscient narrator, Toni Morrison chooses to use two narrators: One gossipy, overtly hostile voice which presents itself as omniscient; admitting only towards the end of the text to have based all of its’ conclusions on what it can observe (Jazz 220-1); And another narrative voice which often follows closely on the heels of the first, makes no claims to complete knowledge, involves no insults to the characters, yet is involved in framing most of their conversations, thoughts and feelings. Both the open ‘flourish’ of the first narrator on the one hand, and the “complicated and inaccessible” insights of the second narrator, on the other hand, concurrently comprise the jazz music of Jazz (1). To create an omniscient narrator who is both first-person and third-person omniscient is jazz-like because this combination “symbolize an incredible kind of improvisation” (Micucci 275). We can say that Mor...

- by Mahboobeh Khaleghi
- •
- English, Toni Morrison, Jazz by Toni Morrison

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are stories of women struggling with mental illness, fictional accounts of the psychological concept of dissociation, showing that dissociation has been an under-analyzed... more

- by Katy-Anne Binstead
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- American Literature, Literature, Literature and Trauma, Toni Morrison
- by Dr. Bhupendra N . Kesur
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- Toni Morrison, Beloved by Toni Morrison

Le roman Beloved de Toni Morrison suit la trajectoire narrative d'une ancienne esclave qui, suite à l'abolition, est confrontée à des souvenirs longtemps refoulés, mais aussi aux institutions sociales qui continuent de reproduire l'idéologie raciste de la suprématie blanche. La parole de la protagoniste, porteuse d'un contre-discours, lie ainsi son histoire personnelle à l'Histoire collective. Outre l'analyse de la déshumanisation des esclaves noir.e.s et de l'intériorisation de l'hégémonie culturelle, l'article de Julie Levasseur met en lumière la manière dont les personnages subalternes peuvent exercer leur agentivité par la revendication de leur propre récit.

- by Julie Levasseur
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- Feminist Theory, Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Subaltern Studies
- by Cyrus R. K. Patell
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- American Literature, Liberalism, Language and Ideology, Ideology

Love and hatred are perennial themes for every writer worth his ink and they equally fascinated the readers down the ages. What is love? and why one loves? are the questions that battered the brilliant minds for a long time. For Shakespeare 'love is not time's fool, ' for John Keats love is the ultimate truth as he said, 'Beauty is truth, truth is beauty' and for M. K. Gandhi love is God. Love, Truth and God serve as synonyms and whoever wanted to pen something, cannot escape them. Love or its absence constitutes the whole of our world literature. Toni Morrison is no exception. Her master work Song of Solomon is perhaps the greatest novel ever written by Afro-American which has a close affinity to Alex Haley's Roots. The protagonist, Milkman, in a transcendental stage finds himself metamorphosed -discovers his identity, ancestral legacy and capacity for love and joy and learns to fly without ever leaving the ground.

- by V N Lakshmi Bhupathiraju
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- Cultural Studies, English Literature, African American Literature, Love