Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Author: Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinert

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-12

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1136085785

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This study analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison’s novels: The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Beloved. Heinert argues how Morrison’s novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the novel itself. This study goes beyond formalist analyses to show how these revisions expose the relationship between race, conventional generic forms, and the dominant culture. Morrison’s revisions critique the conventional roles of African Americans as subjects of and in the genre of the novel, and (re)write roles which instead privilege their subjectivity. This study provides readers with new ways of understanding Morrison’s novels. Whereas critics often fault Morrison for breaking with traditional forms and resisting resolution in her novels, this analysis show how Morrison’s revisions shift the narrative truth of the novel from its representation in conventional forms to its interpretation by the readers, who are responsible for constructing their own resolution or version of narrative truth. These revisions expose how the dominant culture has privileged specific forms of narration; in turn, these forms privilege the values of the dominant culture. Morrison’s novels attempt to undermine this privilege and rewrite the canon of American literature.


A Mercy

A Mercy

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2009-08-11

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 030737307X

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A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.


Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels

Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels

Author: Jean Wyatt

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0820350869

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Introduction: Love and narrative form -- Maternal language and maternal history in Beloved -- Riffing on love and playing with narration in Jazz -- Displacement--political, psychic, and textual--in Paradise -- Love's time and the reader: ethical effects of nachträglichkeit (belatedness) in Love -- Failed messages, maternal loss, and narrative form in A mercy -- Severed limbs, the uncanny, and the return of the repressed in Home -- Love, trauma, and the body in God help the child -- Conclusion: Revisioning love and slavery


Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Author: Mariangela Palladino

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-01-22

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 9004360042

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Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction investigates Morrison’s aesthetics in terms of narrative’s ethical import. Morrison’s writing is concerned with ethically debatable issues and it offers a problematic representation of human experiences in African American history. Whilst previous critical studies consider ethics in relation to events in the story, Palladino explores its intersection with aesthetics. Narrativizing the moral law, Morrison’s imperative is to relate the past, and to find ways to tell what is often unspeakable. The quest for ways to narrate horrific facts is a quest for an aesthetics which includes an appeal to the reader and thus necessarily engages with the ethical. This study foregrounds the equivocal as a key feature of narrative ethics.


The Black Border and Fugitive Narration in Black American Literature

The Black Border and Fugitive Narration in Black American Literature

Author: Paula von Gleich

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-03-07

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 3110761033

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This book tests the limits of fugitivity as a concept in recent Black feminist and Afro-pessimist thought. It follows the conceptual travels of confinement and flight through three major Black writing traditions in North America from the 1840s to the early 21st century. Cultural analysis is the basic methodological approach and recent concepts of captivity and fugitivity in Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory form the theoretical framework.


Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry

Cognitive Style and Perceptual Difference in Browning’s Poetry

Author: Suzanne Bailey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-01-21

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1136993339

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Current work on speech pragmatics and visual thinking calls for a radical reassessment of the problem of obscurity or difficulty in Robert Browning’s work. In this innovative study, Bailey reinterprets Browning's life and work in the context of contemporary theories of language and attention, drawn from the cognitive sciences. Specifically, new readings of under-examined historical sources show the extent to which Browning’s cognitive and perceptual worlds differed from the norm, aligning him with Victorians like Sir Francis Galton or fellow-artist William Wetmore Story. Exploring how perceptual biases are transformed in the language of the poems, Bailey demonstrates how the cognitive sciences can ground a new biographical practice, drawing attention to such matters as the creative process and the ethics of understanding individuals who think differently. In doing so, she re-energizes debates about this unusual Victorian poet, his later works, and the nature of literary style.


The Historical Imagination of G.K. Chesterton

The Historical Imagination of G.K. Chesterton

Author: Joseph R. McCleary

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-02-20

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1135852057

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This study examines a selection of Chesterton’s novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings. Looking at Chesteron's relationship with and influence upon authors including William Cobbett, Sir Walter Scott, Belloc, Shaw, H.G. Wells, Christopher Dawson, Evelyn Waugh, and Marshall McLuhan, McCleary contends that Chesterton’s recurring use of the themes of locality, patriotism, and nationalism embodies a distinctive understanding of what gives history its coherence. The study concludes that Chesterton’s emphasis on locality is the hallmark of his historical philosophy in that it blends the concepts of free will, specificity, and creatureliness which he uses to make sense of history.


Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick

Author: Lejla Kucukalic

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-12-22

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 113589664X

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Kucukalic looks beyond the received criticism and stereotypes attached to Philip K. Dick and his work and shows, using a wealth of primary documents including previously unpublished letters and interviews, that Philip K. Dick is a serious and relevant philosophical and cultural thinker whose writing offer us important insights into contemporary digital culture. Evaluating five novels that span Dick's career--from Martian Time Slip (1964) to Valis (1981)--Kucukalic explores the the intersections of identity, narrative, and technology in order to ask two central, but uncharted "Dickian" questions: What is reality? and What is human?


Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs

Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs

Author: Todd Ruecker

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2017-04-01

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1607326027

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From scholars working in a variety of institutional and geographic contexts and with a wide range of student populations, Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs offers perspectives on how writing programs can support or hinder students’ transitions to college. The contributors present individual and program case studies, student surveys, a wealth of institutional retention data, and critical policy analysis. Rates of student retention in higher education are a widely acknowledged problem: although approximately 66 percent of high school graduates begin college, of those who attend public four-year institutions, only about 80 percent return the following year, with 58 percent graduating within six years. At public two-year institutions, only 60 percent of students return, and fewer than a third graduate within three years. Less commonly known is the crucial effect of writing courses on these statistics. First-year writing is a course that virtually all students have to take; thus, writing programs are well-positioned to contribute to larger institutional conversations regarding retention and persistence and should offer themselves as much-needed sites for advocacy, research, and curricular innovation. Retention, Persistence, and Writing Programs is a timely resource for writing program administrators as well as for new writing teachers, advisors, administrators, and state boards of education. Contributors: Matthew Bridgewater, ​Cristine Busser, Beth Buyserie, Polina Chemishanova, ​Michael Day, ​Bruce Feinstein, ​Patricia Freitag Ericsson, ​Nathan Garrett, ​Joanne Baird Giordano, ​Tawanda Gipson, ​Sarah E. Harris, Mark Hartlaub, ​Holly Hassel, ​Jennifer Heinert, ​Ashley J. Holmes, ​Rita Malenczyk, ​Christopher P. Parker, ​Cassandra Phillips, ​Anna Plemons, ​Pegeen Reichert Powell, ​Marc Scott, Robin Snead, ​Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, ​Sara Webb-Sunderhaus, ​Susan Wolff Murphy


Innovations and Technologies for Soft Skill Development and Learning

Innovations and Technologies for Soft Skill Development and Learning

Author: Nagarajan, Suresh Kumar

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2020-04-10

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1799834662

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Traditional education revolves around the teaching of technical skills, especially within STEM fields. However, soft skills—broadly, communication and intrapersonal skills—are essential within all fields, especially those frequently involving research and collaboration. However, the focus on teaching students to be adept communicators and team members remains woefully underdeveloped. Innovations and Technologies for Soft Skill Development and Learning is a pivotal reference source that explores the mental and psychological growth of individual learners at different stages of education concerning soft skills and the need for innovation and creativity to lead a successful career. Highlighting topics including higher education, emotional intelligence, and student behavior, this book is ideally designed for educators, curriculum developers, instructional designers, administrators, policymakers, academicians, researchers, and students.