Download or read book Social Fact Biological Fiction The Deconstruction of Race in Toni Morrison s Recitatif written by Stefan Löchle and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Constance (Fachgruppe Literaturwissenschaft - British and American Studies), course: American Literature and Culture Part Two - Minority Literatures, language: English, abstract: This term paper examines how Morrison exposes the category of "race" to be mere biological fiction but still serves to structure people's expectations towards eachother in everyday interactions. the main questions tackled in the term paper will be the following: What is the understanding of the term race as presented by Morrison in “Recitatif”? What are the interrelations of race and gender with regard to Afro-American women? What are the social facts surrounding certain attributes of “race”?
Download or read book Social Fact Biological Fiction The Deconstruction of Race in Toni Morrison s Recitatif written by Stefan Löchle and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-08 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Constance (Fachgruppe Literaturwissenschaft - British and American Studies), course: American Literature and Culture Part Two - Minority Literatures, language: English, abstract: This term paper examines how Morrison exposes the category of "race" to be mere biological fiction but still serves to structure people's expectations towards eachother in everyday interactions. the main questions tackled in the term paper will be the following: What is the understanding of the term race as presented by Morrison in "Recitatif"? What are the interrelations of race and gender with regard to Afro-American women? What are the social facts surrounding certain attributes of "race"?
Download or read book Race Trauma and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison written by Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives -- psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories -- Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity. With an innovative application of neuroscience to literary criticism, Schreiber explains how trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Slavery and its legacy of cultural rejection create trauma on individual, familial, and community levels, and parents unwittingly transmit their trauma to their children through repetition of their bodily stored experiences. Concepts of "home" -- whether a physical place, community, or relationship -- are reconstructed through memory to provide a positive self and serve as a healing space for Morrison's characters. Remembering and retelling trauma within a supportive community enables trauma victims to move forward and attain a meaningful subjectivity and selfhood. Through careful analysis of each novel, Schreiber traces the success or failure of Morrison's characters to build or rebuild a cohesive self, starting with slavery and the initial postslavery generation, and continuing through the twentieth century, with a special focus on the effects of inherited trauma on children. When characters attempt to escape trauma through physical relocation, or to project their pain onto others through aggressive behavior or scapegoating, the development of selfhood falters. Only when trauma is confronted through verbalization and challenged with reparative images of home, can memories of a positive self overcome the pain of past experiences and cultural rejection. While the cultural trauma of slavery can never truly disappear, Schreiber argues that memories that reconstruct a positive self, whether created by people, relationships, a physical place, or a concept, help Morrison's characters to establish subjectivity. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Schreiber's book unites psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and social theories into a full and richly textured analysis of trauma and the possibility of healing in Morrison's novels.
Download or read book The Fiction of Toni Morrison written by Jami L. Carlacio and published by National Council of Teachers of English (Ncte). This book was released on 2007 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides classroom approaches and pedagogical suggestions for teaching Morrison's novels in ways which promote critical thinking of issues such as whiteness and critical race theory.
Download or read book Race and Memory in Tony Morrison s Recitatif written by Rüdiger Thomsen and published by . This book was released on 2021-11-13 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Constance (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: American Literature and Culture II, language: English, abstract: Against the standard focus on the questions of race in Tony Morrison's "Recitatif", this paper analyses how the short story features the four levels of memory as defined by Aleida Assmann: individual, social, political, and cultural. African American author Toni Morrison mentions memory as a central theme of her work. While Morrison's novels have been approached from this angle, her only short story "Recitatif" has mostly been read as a comment on race relations and stereotypes. This paper shifts focus from race towards individual and collective memory as vital elements of this story. Still, the issue of race can be integrated in the larger concept of collective memory.
Download or read book What s Real about Race Untangling Science Genetics and Society A Norton Short written by Rina Bliss and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2025-02-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Black on White written by David R. Roediger and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America? From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers have long been among America's keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior, but until now much of this writing has been ignored. Black on White reverses this trend by presenting the work of more than fifty major figures, including James Baldwin, Derrick Bell, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker to take a closer look at the many meanings of whiteness in our society. Rich in irony, artistry, passion, and common sense, these reflections on what Langston Hughes called "the ways of white folks" illustrate how whiteness as a racial identity derives its meaning not as a biological category but as a social construct designed to uphold racial inequality. Powerful and compelling, Black on White provides a much-needed perspective that is sure to have a major impact on the study of race and race relations in America.
Download or read book Recitatif written by Toni Morrison and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison—the only one she ever wrote—about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable at the time, they lose touch as they grow older, only to find each other later at a diner, then at a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and in disagreement each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Written in 1980 and anthologized in a number of collections, this is the first time Recitatif is being published as a stand-alone hardcover. In the story, Twyla’s and Roberta’s races remain ambiguous. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? Morrison herself described this story as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” Recitatif is a remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and about how perceptions are made tangible by reality.
Download or read book Desdemona written by Toni Morrison and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-06-13 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work.' The Guardian Ripped from the world by her husband's paranoia, Desdemona turns in death towards the memory of Barbary, the North African maid who raised her: together, they explore the contours of death, race, war, love and motherhood, in a moving elegy. Audacious with ambition, Desdemona is Toni Morrison's intimate reimagining of the fourth act of Shakespeare's Othello, mixing monologue with Rokia Traore's lyrical songs to re-examine the Bard's presentation of race and female suffering. Part-play, part-concert, part-quest into the afterlife, Desdemona is published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, featuring a new introduction by Joyce Green MacDonald.
Download or read book The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-05-08 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).
Download or read book Honky written by Dalton Conley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vivid memoir captures how race, class, and privilege shaped a white boy’s coming of age in 1970s New York—now with a new epilogue. “I am not your typical middle-class white male,” begins Dalton Conley’s Honky, an intensely engaging memoir of growing up amid predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York’s Lower East Side. In narrating these sharply observed memories, from his little sister’s burning desire for cornrows to the shooting of a close childhood friend, Conley shows how race and class inextricably shaped his life—as well as the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. In a new afterword, Conley, now a well-established senior sociologist, provides an update on what his informants’ respective trajectories tell us about race and class in the city. He further reflects on how urban areas have (and haven’t) changed over the past few decades, including the stubborn resilience of poverty in New York. At once a gripping coming-of-age story and a brilliant case study illuminating broader inequalities in American society, Honky guides us to a deeper understanding of the cultural capital of whiteness, the social construction of race, and the intricacies of upward mobility.
Download or read book Deans and Truants written by Gene Andrew Jarrett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.
Download or read book Race and Gender in Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye written by Kathrin Rosenbaum and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examination Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Throughout history, the highly contested concepts of race and gender have adversely shaped the lives of millions of people. In the United States it is most notably Native Africans and African Americans who have been victimized on the grounds of their skin color. Women of African descent have suffered a double jeopardy due to the intersection of race and gender. For a great many of African Americans, men and women alike, literature has become an “important vehicle to represent the social context, to expose inequality, racism and social injustice.” In The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison explores the issue of African American female identity. The female Bildungsroman scrutinizes the problem of growing up black and female in a society which equates beauty with blue-eyed whiteness. Consumer goods, the media, adult approval and a dismissive attitude towards her mislead the protagonist Pecola Breedlove to internalize white beauty standards. With the story of Pecola, Morrison points out how the internalization leads to racial self-loathing and eventually to self-destruction. Nonetheless, the negative tone of The Bluest Eye is in part counteracted through Claudia MacTeer, whose narrative is juxtaposed to Pecola’s anti-Bildung and thus turns the novel into a double Bildungsroman with one girl “growing up” and the other one “growing down.” The following thesis will focus on the issues of race and gender in The Bluest Eye. The topic can be considered of particular relevance as it addresses a theme which remained unexamined until the 1970s, a theme which many have not wanted to know about and which others have been in denial about. Morrison, though, faces the truth about the intersection of race and gender by exploring in her novel how racism and sexism function, as well as the devastating consequences that can occur. Her debut further underlines that the search for culprits is complicated since the perpetrators in the crimes against Pecola are often victims themselves. [...]
Download or read book On the Sleeve of the Visual written by Alessandra Raengo and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2013 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of race and the ontology of the visual
Download or read book Toni Morrison s Jazz Historical Fiction in Relation to Nonfictional Accounts of the Harlem Renaissance written by Florian König and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, http: //www.uni-jena.de/, course: African America in the Historical Novel, language: English, abstract: "...who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". This statement by the Swedish Academy seems an appropriate description of Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison. Her novel Jazz, which was first published in 1992, is set in the Harlem of the 1920s and re-creates an "essential aspect" of African-American history - the Harlem Renaissance. [...] In this project on the subject of 'African America in the Historical Novel', I want to examine Morrison's fictional representation of the afrorementioned era in relation to nonfictional depictions provided by significant writers of this epoch who explored the implications of jazz (and the development of African-American culture) during the actual historical period in which Morrison's novel is set. Therefore, her own narrative approach to history will be compared to the views Harlem Renaissance contemporaries such as Alain Locke and F. Scott Fitzgerald articulated in their assessments of this particular epoch of (African-) American experience. Selected parts of the Survey Graphic's issue Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro edited by Alain Locke and foundation for his groundbreaking anthology The New Negro as well as Fitzgerald's notable essay Echoes of the Jazz Age2 will be taken into consideration when evaluating Morrison's historical reconstruction of how the Harlem Renaissance, or how Fitzgerald calls it, the "Jazz Age", shaped and expressed African-American identity.
Download or read book Critical Theory Today written by Lois Tyson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Theory Today is the essential introduction to contemporary criticial theory. It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.
Download or read book Interactive Fiction What Does it Want to Be What Can it Be written by Wolfgang Ruttkowski and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific Essay from the year 1997 in the subject German Studies - Genres, Kyoto Sangyo University (Japanese Society for Germanistics), course: Yearly Congress of the japanese german organization, Tokio, 11.5.1996, language: English, abstract: We see that in interactive literature, the danger lies less in interactivity as such, but rather in the simultaneity of heterogeneous input it allows. As "strata-poetics" has taught us our reading experience is always an intensely interactive one. We contribute more to it than we aware of. More precisely: the characteristic experience of literature (especially of poesy) is not possible without intense interactivity between author and reader. It is the simultaneity of various heterogeneous and often contradictory reader-contributions, not inspired by the work itself but by the willfulness of the "readers", which cast the "Internet Story" in doubt as a valid literary genre.
