Toni Morrison (Literature) Research Papers (original) (raw)

The present paper adopts a qualitative approach for studying Toni Morrison's
novel God Help the Child in the light of Milkhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. According to
this theory, it can be claimed that this novel is polyphonic (i.e., multi-voiced). Morrison's own
voice has not come in the novel between reader and the story as her point of view is absent
from the novel. Instead, many other stories are reverberating with too much human life as the
novel is divided into four parts with each part divided into subparts. Each of these subparts
has a character to say it.

- by and +1
- •
- Literary Theory, Toni Morrison (Literature), Bakhtin dialogism
- by Chloe L Sell
- •
- American Literature, Sexual Violence, African American Literature, Cultural Memory
- by Jason Stephens
- •
- Critical Theory, History, Literature, Higher Education

Authors and critics define “home” as both a physical place and a psychic space. While the word commonly denotes a fixed residence or domestic setting, the concept of “home” extends beyond the material structure of a house into a psycho-emotional space of being. Carole Després explains that home provides a sense of “physical security” for individuals and thus becomes a “haven” or “sanctuary” wherein one can escape “outside pressures” and maintain “privacy and independence” (98). Home, she explicates, offers both security and solace, affording its occupants a sense of “belonging” (98). Clichés such as “there’s no place like home” underscore a state of safety, comfort, and nostalgia. Home becomes a “locus of intense emotional experience,” offering inhabitants an “atmosphere of social understanding” where one’s identities and behaviors are often accepted (Després 98). This interpretation may have led Maya Angelou to call home “the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned” (196) and Robert Frost to quip, “Home is the place were, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in” (38). While the memories connected to home are often positive, they can also bring pain. If “home is where the heart is,” as Pliny the Elder affirms (qtd. in Titleman 312), then home, like the symbol of the heart, evokes not only love and joy but also heartbreak and heartache. Perhaps for this reason, Salman Rushdie depicts “home” as a state of trauma and loss (22). In her novel HOME, Morrison utilizes home’s physical and psychological senses to underscore the concurrent difficulty and necessity of confronting the troubling (and even traumatizing) memories and relationships associated with “home.” Only in facing—or “coming home” to—trauma, Morrison suggests, can one overcome it—with the committed support of an engaged reader who accompanies the speaker-survivor on the journey home.

- by Ivan Delazari
- •
- American Literature, American Studies, Narrative, Narratology

Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be read as a decidedly theological work, particularly in its expression of redemptive communal unity through narrative re-telling. Morrison’s imagined community in Beloved moves from fragmented isolation to liberative solidarity with each other, dramatically exemplifying a postcolonial theological vision, which draws from African traditional cultures. Although often rejected by some theological interpreters as ‘pop-gnostic’, Toni Morrison’s Beloved rejects a theological worldview of coloniality and offers instead a hybridised approach to theological meaning. In dispelling the racial ‘othering’ that frequently occurs in both literature and theology, Morrison crafts a theological narrative that retells the sinful past in the hope of transcending guilt for the sake of a harmonious future. Thus, the theological insight of Beloved is found in a syncretic cosmology that does not perpetuate colonial ontological categories but forges a communal narrative that is non-possessive and open to a future free from the shackles of the past. Morrison’s Beloved equips the theologian with pertinent questions, ones that wrestle with the presence of God within a suffering and oppressed community; these are timely questions that must be posed to the Christian tradition in order to transcend the lies of white theology.

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
- •
- Critical Theory, American Literature, Jewish American Literature, American Studies

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
- •
- American Literature, Literature, Literature and Trauma, Toni Morrison
- by Tsv Ban
- •
- American Literature, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Literature, Toni Morrison

The paper tries to focus in a system where chauvinism, malevolent and sexism exists there a young black girl's endeavour to achieve beauty, a means for happiness and survival. The novel portrays the effect of discrimination on a budding teenager's sexual being that put her in a gloomy and scary atmosphere from where the character was unable to leap out. Race and sex issues are at the heart of this enduring novel where white racism and black sexism affected the little innocent girl. The novel is Toni Morrison's incredible string of sensitive, imaginative and exploratory contemporary fiction, positioned after the Great Depression era in 1941 Lorain, Ohio. The novel shows the prejudices that created a crater in the black man's psyche and his unexposed aggression on the white world led to his psychological repression which he reveal on the associate female members.

- by itishri s and +1
- •
- Toni Morrison (Literature)

Trees as a Symbol of Trauma in Morrisons Beloved.

- by Irena Iličević
- •
- Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison (Literature), Beloved by Toni Morrison

In her works, Beloved and A Mercy , Toni Morrison considers both pre-slavery and post -slavery African-American community in which people suffer physically and psychologically from the dominant culture; especially women, who learn to heal themselves with sharing stories of their traumatic life. Female solidarity also empowers the female protagonists to establish their own identity. Wrath and violence are steady motifs thro ughout the novels, and Morrison exposes the dangers of manhood that relies on violence and oppr ession. Slavery, class and gender inequity, betrayal, and brutality are described through the l ives of the novel’s characters.

- by Mahboobeh Khaleghi
- •
- Gender Studies, English, Racial and ethnic discrimination, Toni Morrison

another incomplete paper but i hope it helps however it may.

- by paige grillo
- •
- English Literature, Literature, English language, Identity (Culture)

In her works, Beloved and A Mercy, Toni Morrison considers both pre-slavery and post-slavery African-American community in which people suffer physically and psychologically from the dominant culture; especially women, who learn to heal themselves with sharing stories of their traumatic life. Female solidarity also empowers the female protagonists to establish their own identity. Wrath and violence are steady motifs throughout the novels, and Morrison exposes the dangers of manhood that relies on violence and oppression. Slavery, class and gender inequity, betrayal, and brutality are described through the lives of the novel's characters.

- by V N Lakshmi Bhupathiraju
- •
- Creative Writing, James Joyce, Identity (Culture), Samuel Beckett

The present paper adopts a qualitative approach for studying Toni Morrison's novel God Help the Child in the light of Milkhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism. According to this theory, it can be claimed that this novel is polyphonic (i.e., multi-voiced). Morrison's own voice has not come in the novel between reader and the story as her point of view is absent from the novel. Instead, many other stories are reverberating with too much human life as the novel is divided into four parts with each part divided into subparts. Each of these subparts has a character to say it.

- by Jihan Zayed and +1
- •
- Polyphony, Toni Morrison (Literature), Bakhtin dialogism
- by Jami L Carlacio, PhD, MDiv
- •
- Toni Morrison (Literature), A Mercy

Toni Morrison has presented the realistic picture of African American lives through her novels. She thinks that in the slave narratives so many issues and aspects related to the lives of African Americans are missed out and forgotten. She feels that it is dangerous if one forgets the past or never tries to understand it. She also feels that it is her responsibility to bring out these facts before her readers and make them aware and think about the horrible and terrible conditions of African Americans during slavery. The present paper is an attempt to study that how Toni Morrison has depicted the picture of slavery and its effect on the lives of African Americans in Beloved. It also discusses Toni Morrison as a critique of an institutionalized dehumanization in Beloved. Beloved presents that how the African Americans were dehumanized by the established institutions during slavery.

According to Morrison, race and home have always been priorities in her work. All her novels focus on race-inflected topics, and home, which African-Americans have been historically dispossessed of, is also one of her concerns as it is strongly related to healing, identity, and self-authorship. Among her novels, Paradise (1997) and Home (2010) are the ones that most clearly delineate the theme of home. The objective of this paper is to analyze how Morrison's concept of home, explicated in her address at the conference entitled "Race Matters" at Princeton University in 1997, is shown in these two works. Morrison's design, that is, to create a space in her fiction where race both matters and is irrelevant; a space that is explicitly gendered, open, borderless and communal, is successful in both novels. Nevertheless, when comparing Paradise and Home, there are some major differences in how she handles the theme of home. Most importantly, the two novels arrive at rather contrasting conclusions: in Paradise, home as haven can only be short-lived, whereas there is an overwhelmingly positive closure at the end of Home involving complete healing.

Slavery as a ruthless possessiveness outlines individuals as their portable possessions,whereas rejecting to identify their distinct identity. Slavery has a very close relationship with slave’s memory. Beloved portrays the emotional response of each character to unimaginable loss and suffering. Masterfully, Toni Morrison tries to show the Negro characters in the history which their traumatic memories are always with them. This paper tries to shed light on the reflection of history on slavery,memory and discourses in this novel in which characters have tragedy to forget their awful memories concerning the Slavery in the United States. In this way, it uses the critical views by Rigney, Mathieson and Fitzgerald.

A THEMATIC STUDY ON TONI MORRISON'S BLUEST EYE

- by VIFIL VIJAY. V .F
- •
- Toni Morrison (Literature), The Bluest Eye, Novel Analysis

What is prevalent in Morrison’s work is the use of female characters. The mother-daughter relationship that usually connects them will be examined from the sociopolitical perspective of slavery. Instead of simply acknowledging the disenfranchisement of African-Americans, the aim is to recognize the ongoing expropriation that is taking place in the present not necessarily limited to African-Americans. We may not be able to rectify the past but we can make a change in the present by acknowledging the very existence of the problem. For this reason I propose to read Morrison’s novels under the scope of Said’s secular criticism to establish worldly connections between the past and the present for a different future. Mother-daughter relationships embody expropriation because they are the most brutally attacked by slavery and because, through them, dispossession is perpetuated; women are both property and means of reproduction of property, thus sustaining the condition of expropriation. It will be discussed how slavery interferes with maternal relationships, concrete examples will be provided by A Mercy and Beloved through the discussion of the mother-daughter relationships found in each novel and patterns will be explored so as to reach the discussion of the rights of the expropriated.

- by Chrysa Titi
- •
- Women's Studies, Toni Morrison, Edward Said, Toni Morrison (Literature)

Abstract
A work of shocking evocations and stunning poetry, Toni Morrison's Beloved has become a must on American literary reading lists, in spite of its bewildering complexity. It has been read as pertaining to various sub-genres: trauma-literature, feminist literature, slave narratives, post-colonialism, post-modernism, the fantastic, the Gothic, the grotesque, the sublime, the beautiful, magical realism, the mystery novel, etc. This essay argues that although Beloved is a text-book case of the magical realist (and not the fantastic) narrative mode, which strengthens its grotesque and Gothic aspects but weakens its claims to realism, the book's poetic language and authorial exaltation make it also an illustration of marvelous realism. These various aesthetic facets combine with modernist narrative fragmentation techniques which turn this major poetic exploration of the trauma of African American slavery into a potentially traumatic experience for readers in search of who speaks in Beloved?

- by Bronwyn Hoskins-Davies
- •
- English Literature, Literature, Womanism, Toni Morrison (Literature)

This project involves an analysis of the factors that sustain Rebekka's enslavement in 17th century America. Sold by her English family to an American landowner, Rebekka ships to the New World pursuing liberation from London's society and her family, ignoring that her fate would be no different from what she left behind. This research is based on Toni Morrison's portrayal of Rebekka's story in A Mercy and undermines her role as slave to the rigid patriarchal family structures that, motivated by religious and social institutions, determined the strict gender roles that repressed her. The case of Rebekka highlights the male oppression that white women also suffered during a period when almost everyone experienced or was involved in slavery, and accounts for the dangerous outcome of restricting and isolating women's life based on a complete dependency on the male figure.

- by Mònica Barcons
- •
- American Literature, Self and Identity, Feminism, Contemporary Literature

This paper explores how Toni Morrison presents with her 2008 novel A Mercy a literal and figurative queer ecosemiotic structure, and it eventually discusses how queerly positioned (and displaced) people might be able to forge new homes and families by choice. Morrison’s ecosemiotics in A Mercy rework environmental signification, which both queers the norm and paves the way for progress. My queer ecosemiotic reading of this text claims that Morrison’s most productive linguistic ingenuity arises through her use of the ecosignifier “family” (across all characters’ narrations and all twelve sections), which culminates in the conjoined narrative of Willard and Scully and their hopes for the future.

- by Sam Lauer
- •
- Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Literary Theory, Ecofeminism

Recent years have witnessed a general backlash against identity politics, both in the academy and the public sphere. This paper recognises the problems in identity politics as arising from an apparent difficulty in conceptualising identity separately from notions of fixity and exclusion. It argues that politicised identities could, instead, be premised upon an explicit affirmation of the provisionality of political identity that is oriented to a “tomorrow “ in which the identity will no longer be required.

- by Gurminder K Bhambra and +1
- •
- Social Identity, Identity politics, Toni Morrison (Literature), Identity

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
- •
- Gender, Capitalism, Racism, Toni Morrison (Literature)
- by Tony Wolff
- •
- Toni Morrison (Literature)