Living Language, Living Memory - Essays on the Works of Toni Morrison

Living Language, Living Memory - Essays on the Works of Toni Morrison PDF Author: Kerstin W Shands
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789186069957
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
In 1993 Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel committee described her work as "characterized by visionary force and poetic import [that] gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." Twenty years later, a group of scholars met in Stockholm to commemorate and celebrate Morrison's award, and just as importantly, to critically engage the wealth of scholarship that has sprung up around Morrison's work-both the six novels recognized by the Nobel committee and those works of fiction and criticism published in the two decades afterwards. The essays in this collection implicitly and explicitly take up Morrison's clarion call to vivify language. They engage her words by elaborating on their meaning, offering readings of her literary texts that highlight their intertextuality, their proliferating conversations with other texts and contexts, and even other languages. In some, Morrison's words give life to authors no longer with us, in others we are encouraged to resituate her writing in unfamiliar contexts in order to highlight the multiplicity of meanings generated by her work. The essays offer rich testimony to the life-giving properties of Morrison's language and seek to contribute to the ongoing afterlife of her work by adding to the scholarly conversations animated by her extraordinary literary career. Authors: Andrea Sillis, Lynn Penrod, Sangita Rayamajhi, Anna Iatsenko, Giulia Grillo Mikrut, Lucy Buzacott, Hilary Emmett, Tuire Valkeakari, Aoi Mori, Laura Castor & Kerstin W. Shands.

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.”

Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place

Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place PDF Author: Alice Sundman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000543331
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
How does Toni Morrison create and form her literary places? As one of the first studies exploring Morrison’s archived drafts, notes, and manuscripts together with her published novels, this book offers fresh insights into her creative processes. It analyses the author’s textual choices, her writerly strategies, and her process of writing, all combining in shaping her literary places. In a methodology combining close reading and genetic criticism, the book examines Morrison’s writing—her drafting and crafting—of her fictional places. Focusing primarily on the novels Beloved (1987), Paradise (1997), and A Mercy (2008), it analyses particular instances of written places, illuminating the manifold ways in which they are formed as text, and showing the centrality of the ideas of joining in Beloved, transformation in Paradise, and articulation in A Mercy. Toni Morrison is a major literary figure in contemporary literature, and is commonly considered one of the most influential American writers of the post-1960s era. Investigating the conjunction of her texts and manuscripts, this book continues, extends, and supplements the rich body of Morrison scholarship by illuminating how the genesis and formation of her multifaceted literary places constitute vital parts of her fictional writing.

Conversations with Toni Morrison

Conversations with Toni Morrison PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878056927
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Collected interviews with the Nobel Prize winner in which she describes herself as an African American writer and that show her to be an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African American experience

Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature

Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature PDF Author: María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319617591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
This volume explores the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. By focusing on contemporary narratives in English from 1990 to the present, the essays in the collection delve into both the treatment of memory in literature and the view of literature as a medium of memory, paying special attention to major controversies attending the representation and (re)construction of individual, cultural and collective memories in the literary narratives published during the last few decades. By analysing texts written by authors of such diverse origins as Great Britain, South-Korea, the USA, Cuba, Australia, India, as well as Native-American Indian and African-American writers, the contributors to the collection analyse a good range of memory frictions —in connection with melancholic mourning, immigration, diaspora, genocide, perpetrator guilt, dialogic witnessing, memorialisation practices, inherited traumatic memories, sexual abuse, prostitution, etc.— through the recourse to various disciplines —such as psychoanalysis, ethics, (bio)politics, space theories, postcolonial studies, narratology, gender studies—, resulting in a book that is expected to make a ground-breaking contribution to a field whose possibilities have yet to be fully explored.

Beyond the Doctrine of Man

Beyond the Doctrine of Man PDF Author: Joseph Drexler-Dreis
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823285871
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Catalyzed by Sylvia Wynter’s questioning of modern/colonial descriptions of the human person, the essays in Beyond the Doctrine of Man interrogate the problem of these definitions of the human person and take up the struggle to decolonize and unsettle such descriptions. Contributors: Rufus Burnett Jr., M. Shawn Copeland, Yomaira C. Figueroa, Patrice Haynes, Xhercis Méndez, Andrew Prevot, Mayra Rivera, Linn Marie Tonstad, Alexander G. Weheliye

Social Justice and Putting Theory Into Practice in Schools and Communities

Social Justice and Putting Theory Into Practice in Schools and Communities PDF Author: Brand, Susan Trostle
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1522594361
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Educators in the K-12 and adult education milieu, including pre- and in-service educators, are expected to address, in and outside of the classroom, significant political and social issues including increased homelessness, food insecurity, poverty, gender dysphoria, school bullying, and marginalization of the LGBTQ population. Educators seek swift solutions to the situations at hand that will benefit K-12 students. Social Justice and Putting Theory Into Practice in Schools and Communities is an essential research publication that provides detailed research on the creation and implementation of social justice strategies in educational settings. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as gender equality, academic standards, and special education, this book is ideal for educators, sociologists, academicians, researchers, and curriculum designers.

The Source of Self-Regard

The Source of Self-Regard PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525562796
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR). These pages give us her searing prayer for the dead of 9/11, her Nobel lecture on the power of language, her searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., her heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. She looks deeply into the fault lines of culture and freedom: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s),” human rights, the artist in society, the Afro-American presence in American literature. And she turns her incisive critical eye to her own work (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, Paradise) and that of others. An essential collection from an essential writer, The Source of Self-Regard shines with the literary elegance, intellectual prowess, spiritual depth, and moral compass that have made Toni Morrison our most cherished and enduring voice.

Sacred Femininity and the Politics of Affect in African American Women's Fiction

Sacred Femininity and the Politics of Affect in African American Women's Fiction PDF Author: Vicent Cucarella Ramón
Publisher: Universitat de València
ISBN: 8491343180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This book presents the way in which African American women writers (Hannah Crafts, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison) have followed the spiritual endeavor of black Christianity as created by early nineteenth-century spiritual narratives to construct a sacred reading of the black female self. The sacred femininity that puts the ethics and aesthetics of African American women at the center of a certain mode of (African) Americanness relies on a view of spirituality that joins women ontologically and validates affective modes of representation as an innovative means to obtain social and personal empowerment.

Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing

Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing PDF Author: Sheldon George
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135038349X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
In what innovative ways do novels by diasporic Black women writers experiment with the representation of Black subjectivity? This collection explores the inventiveness of contemporary Black women writers – Black British, African, Caribbean, African American – who remake traditional understandings of blackness. As the title word “experimental” signals, these essays foreground the narrative form and stylistic innovations of the black-authored novels they analyze. They also show how these experiments with form mirror the novels' convention-breaking experiments with reimagining Black female subjectivities. While each novel, of course, represents the complexities of diasporic experiences differently, some issues emerge that are broadly shared not just within a regional group, but across geographical borders. One feature of the collection is a comparative look at such linking themes across borders, under the rubrics: a return to precolonial systems of belief, reinventions of mothering, relational subjectivities, memory, history and haunting, and posthumanist revaluations. These themes take different shapes across the multitude of diverse cultures studied in this book. But together they establish a pan-global imaginative practice.