How Stories break the Silence in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

How Stories break the Silence in Toni Morrison's Author: Anika Kehl
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656723990
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Late 20th Century Novels, language: English, abstract: In Toni Morrison’s "Beloved", it is Sethe, a black woman and a former slave, who tries to find her own identity within herself through stories. She has to go back to the stories of her ancestors and to the memories she has of her life on Sweet Home in order to find out what being free really means. While trying to start a new life she listens to many stories about her past and is confronted with her own stories. In whichever form, told, sung, or danced out in front of her, the stories appear, they mark her, her daughter, and her companion’s identity. This paper argues that stories are the marker of one’s identity. Stories, that are based upon personal experiences and tellings of others, which enter ones mind and never let go are the stories we live by and those we are to tell since “we are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell”. Furthermore our “[...] identities are the stories we live by”. After giving some background information to the book the paper is going to define the concepts of story, history, memory and identity, which are relevant for the thesis, afterwards it will be analyzed what impact stories can have on the life of a person and various examples from Beloved will be discussed. It will be tried to explain in which form the stories appear and how the characters deal with their life stories. In conclusion, it will be analyzed how the stories, by which Toni Morrison’s characters live, can break the silence.

How Stories break the Silence in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

How Stories break the Silence in Toni Morrison's Author: Anika Kehl
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656723990
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 26

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Late 20th Century Novels, language: English, abstract: In Toni Morrison’s "Beloved", it is Sethe, a black woman and a former slave, who tries to find her own identity within herself through stories. She has to go back to the stories of her ancestors and to the memories she has of her life on Sweet Home in order to find out what being free really means. While trying to start a new life she listens to many stories about her past and is confronted with her own stories. In whichever form, told, sung, or danced out in front of her, the stories appear, they mark her, her daughter, and her companion’s identity. This paper argues that stories are the marker of one’s identity. Stories, that are based upon personal experiences and tellings of others, which enter ones mind and never let go are the stories we live by and those we are to tell since “we are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell”. Furthermore our “[...] identities are the stories we live by”. After giving some background information to the book the paper is going to define the concepts of story, history, memory and identity, which are relevant for the thesis, afterwards it will be analyzed what impact stories can have on the life of a person and various examples from Beloved will be discussed. It will be tried to explain in which form the stories appear and how the characters deal with their life stories. In conclusion, it will be analyzed how the stories, by which Toni Morrison’s characters live, can break the silence.

Beloved

Beloved PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0307264882
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present. Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison PDF Author: Adrienne Lanier Seward
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626742049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home. In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison’s focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Dove’s “The Buckeye” and Sonia Sanchez’s “Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo.”

Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s "Beloved"

Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s Author: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000213676
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”: The Case for Reparations is an inspired contribution to the scholarship on one of the most influential American novels and novelists. The author positions this contemporary classic as a meditation on historical justice and re-comprehends it as both a formal tragedy— a generic translation of fiction and tragedy or a “novel-tragedy” (Kliger)—and a novel of objects. Its many things—literary, conceptual, linguistic— are viewed as vessels carrying the (hi)story and the political concerns. From this, a third conclusion is drawn: Fadem argues for a view of Beloved as a case for reparations. That status is founded on two outstanding object lessons: the character of Beloved as embodiment of the subject-object relations defining the slave state and the grammatical object “weather” in the sentence “The rest is...” on the novel’s final page. This intertextual reference places Beloved in a comparative link with Hamlet and Oresteia. Fadem’s research is meticulous in engaging the full spectrum of tragedy theory, much critical theory, and a full swathe of scholarship on the novel. Few critics take up the matter of reparations, still fewer the politics of genre, craft, and form. This scholar posits Morrison’s tragedy as constituting a searing critique of modernity, as composed through meaningful intertextualities and as crafted by profound “thingly” objects (Brown). Altogether, Fadem has divined a fascinating singular treatment of Beloved exploring the connections between form and craft together with critical historical and political implications. The book argues, finally, that this novel’s first concern is justice, and its chief aim to serve as a clarion call for material— and not merely symbolic—reparations.

Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison's Beloved PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1604131845
Category : African American women in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A collection of critical essays that examine Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved," with a chronology of the author's life, an overview of the novel, its plot, themes, characters, and literary impact, and an introduction by Harold Bloom.

Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's Beloved

Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's Beloved PDF Author: Barbara H. Solomon
Publisher: Twayne Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Ten reviews and seventeen essays present critical commentary on the novel "Beloved," by Toni Morrison.

No Turning Back

No Turning Back PDF Author: Estelle Freedman
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345450531
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
“On the situations of women around the world today, this one book provides more illumination and insight than a dozen others combined. . . . Freedman’s survey is a triumph of global scope and informed precision.” –NANCY F. COTT Professor of History, Harvard University Repeatedly declared dead by the media, the women’s movement has never been as vibrant as it is today. Indeed as Stanford professor and award-winning author Estelle B. Freedman argues in her compelling book, feminism has reached a critical momentum from which there is no turning back. Freedman examines the historical forces that have fueled the feminist movement over the past two hundred years–and explores how women today are looking to feminism for new approaches to issues of work, family, sexuality, and creativity. Drawing examples from a variety of countries and cultures, from the past and the present, this inspiring narrative will be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the role women play in the world. Searching in its analysis and global in its perspective, No Turning Back will stand as a defining text in one of the most important social movements of all time.

Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History

Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History PDF Author: Marie Drews
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443810479
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century offers a critical valuation of literature composed by black female writers and examines their projects of reclamation, rememory, and revision. As a collection, it engages black women writers’ efforts to create more inclusive conceptualizations of community, gender, and history, conceptualizations that take into account alternate lived and written experiences as well as imagined futures. Contributors to this collection probe the realms of gender studies, postcolonialism, and post-structural theory and suggest important ways in which to explore connections between home, motherhood, and history across the multifarious narratives of African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences. Together they argue that it is through their female characters that black women writers demonstrate the tumultuous processes of deciphering home and homeland, of articulating the complexities of mothering relationships, and of locating their own personal history within local and national narratives. Essays gathered in this collection consider the works of African American women writers (Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, Lalita Tademy, Lorene Cary, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sherley Anne Williams) alongside the works of black women writers from the Caribbean (Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau), Guyana (Grace Nichols), and Cuba (María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno).

Women's Untold Stories

Women's Untold Stories PDF Author: Mary Romero
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415922074
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Breaking the Silence

Breaking the Silence PDF Author: David Ikard
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807135690
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Can black males offer useful insights on black women and patriarchy? Many black feminists are doubtful. Their skepticism derives in part from a history of explosive encounters with black men who blamed feminism for stigmatizing black men and undermining racial solidarity and in part from a perception that black male feminists are opportunists capitalizing on the current popularity of black women's writing and criticism. In Breaking the Silence, David Ikard goes boldly to the crux of this debate through a series of provocative readings of key African American texts that demonstrate the possibility and value of a viable black male feminist perspective. Seeking to advance the primary objectives of black feminism, Ikard provides literary models from Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's Paradise, Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, and Walter Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Walkin' the Dog that consciously wrestle with the concept of victim status for black men and women. He looks at how complicity across gender lines, far from rooting out patriarchy in the black community, has allowed it to thrive. This complicity, Ikard explains, is a process by which victimized groups invest in victim status to the point that they unintentionally concede power to their victimizers and engage in patterns of behavior that are perceived as revolutionary but actually reinforce the status quo. While black feminism has fostered important and necessary discussions regarding the problems of patriarchy within the black community, little attention has been paid to the intersecting dynamics of complicity. By laying bare the nexus between victim status and complicity in oppression, Breaking the Silence charts a new direction for conceptualizing black women's complex humanity and provides the foundations for more expansive feminist approaches to resolving intraracial gender conflicts.