Download or read book The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison written by Connor, Marc C. and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-01-06 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and gender politics. This gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth century. Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative, and language, and through questions of affect and reader response, the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary research in the black English oral tradition, The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking similarity to "Afro-American communal structures." At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts, establishing the African American and female voices that are essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is nearly 2,500 years old. These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's writing and between the artistic production and its role in the world at large. These relations show the rich political implications that aesthetic analysis engenders. By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain. The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison written by Marc C. Conner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-01-06 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and gender politics. This gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth century. Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative, and language, and through questions of affect and reader response, the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary research in the black English oral tradition, The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking similarity to “Afro-American communal structures.” At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts, establishing the African American and female voices that are essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is nearly 2,500 years old. These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's writing and between the artistic production and its role in the world at large. These relations show the rich political implications that aesthetic analysis engenders. By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain. The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.
Download or read book Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison s Fiction written by Mariangela Palladino and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-01-22 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition written by Justine Baillie and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering her essays, short stories and dramatic works as well as her novels, this is a comprehensive study of Morrison's place in contemporary American culture.
Download or read book Toni Morrison written by Carmen Gillespie and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.
Download or read book Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life written by Christopher Freeburg and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Freeburg’s Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life offers a crucial new reading of a neglected aspect of African American literature and art across the long twentieth century. Rejecting the idea that the most dehumanizing of black experiences, such as lynching or other racial violence, have completely robbed victims of their personhood, Freeburg rethinks what it means to be a person in the works of black artists. This book advances the idea that individual persons always retain the ability to withhold, express, or change their ideas, and this concept has profound implications for long-held assumptions about the relationship between black interior life and black collective political interests. Examining an array of seminal black texts—from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching pamphlets to works by Richard Wright, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison—Freeburg demonstrates that the personhood represented by these writers unsettles rather than automatically strengthens black subjects’ relationships to political movements such as racial uplift, civil rights, and black nationalism. He shows how black artists illuminate the challenges of racial collectivity while stressing the vital stakes of individual personhood. In his challenge to current African Americanist criticism, Freeburg makes a striking contribution to our understanding of African American literature and culture.
Download or read book Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic written by Madhu Dubey and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1994-05-22 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focus on the works of Toni Morrison, Gaye Jones, and Alice Walker.
Download or read book The Toni Morrison Book Club written by Juda Bennett and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four friends--black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born--offer a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we make space to find ourselves in fiction and turn to Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life.
Download or read book Aesthetic Nervousness written by Ato Quayson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Ato Quayson launches a thoroughly cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of the representation of physical disability. Quayson suggests that the subliminal unease and moral panic invoked by the disabled is refracted within the structures of literature and literary discourse itself, a crisis he terms "aesthetic nervousness." The disabled reminds the able-bodied that the body is provisional and temporary and that normality is wrapped up in certain social frameworks. Quayson expands his argument by turning to Greek and Yoruba writings, African American and postcolonial literature, depictions of deformed characters in early modern England and the plays of Shakespeare, and children's films, among other texts. He considers how disability affects interpersonal relationships and forces the character and the reader to take an ethical standpoint, much like representations of violence, pain, and the sacred. The disabled are also used to represent social suffering, inadvertently obscuring their true hardships.
Download or read book Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures written by Timothy Aubry and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground. From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.
Download or read book The Mask of Art written by Clyde Taylor and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-22 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taylor exposes the concept of 'art' as a tool of ethnocentricity and radical ideology. He challenges the history of aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism and questions the myth of its ancient Greek origin.
Download or read book Sula written by Toni Morrison and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2002-04-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
Download or read book Black is Beautiful written by Paul C. Taylor and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time – philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another– from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology – producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful Winner of The American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize 2017
Download or read book Mouth Full of Blood written by Toni Morrison and published by Arrow. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence.
Download or read book The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison written by J. Duvall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-12-14 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although all published biographical information on Toni Morrison agrees that her birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, John Duvall's book challenges this claim. Using new biographical information, he explores the issue of names and naming in Morrison's fiction and repeatedly finds surprising traces of the Nobel Prize-winning author's struggle to construct a useable identity as an African American woman novelist. Whatever the exact circumstances surrounding her decision to become Toni, one thing becomes clear: the question of identity was not a given for Morrison.
Download or read book Cultural Sites of Critical Insight written by Angela L. Cotten and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together criticism on both African American and Native American women writers, this book offers fresh perspectives on art and beauty, truth, justice, community, and the making of a good and happy life. The essays draw on interdisciplinary, feminist, and comparative methods in the works of writers such as Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, Alice Walker, Linda Hogan, Paula Gunn Allen, Luci Tapahonso, Phillis Wheatley, and Sherley Anne Williams, making them more accessible for critical consideration in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and critical theory. The contributors formulate unique frameworks for interpreting the multiple levels of complex, cultural play between Native American and African American women writers in America, and pave the way for innovative hermeneutic possibilities for reassessing writers of both traditions.
Download or read book Beloved written by Toni Morrison and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 2006-10-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
