The buckeye / Rita Dove -- "Dangerously free": Morrison's unspeakable territory / Philip Weinstein -- Modernity and the homeless: Toni Morrison and the fictions of modernity / Marc C. Conner -- Resurrecting the dead girl: modernism and the problem of history in Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise / Ann Hostetler -- To make a humanist Black: Toni Wofford's Howard years / Dana A. Williams -- Trying to get home: place and memory in Toni Morrison's fiction / Cheryl A. Wall -- The pursuit of memory / Claudine Raynaud -- Personal and cultural memory in A mercy / Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber -- Love, an elegy for the African American community, or: the unintended consequences of desegregation/integration / Lucille P. Fultz -- From Eden to Paradise: a pilgrimage through Toni Morrison's trilogy / Shirley A. Stave -- "And the greatest of these": Toni Morrison, the Bible, love / Katherine Clay Bassard -- Palimpsest: reading John Winthrop through the Morrison trilogy / Justine Tally -- Magically flying with Toni Morrison: Mexico, Gabriel García Márquez, Song of Solomon, and Sula / Davíd Carrasco -- Property and American identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Lovalerie King -- Aeschylus, Euripides, and Toni Morrison: Miasma, revenge, and atonement / Tessa Roynon -- Toni Morrison's performance of the word in Song of Solomon: the folkloric, the fantastic, and "some old folks lie" / Alma Jean Billingslea Brown -- "A kind of restoration": psychogeographies of healing in Toni Morrison's Home / Valorie Thomas -- Aesthetic activity / Claudia Brodsky -- "'There is the power,' he thought, 'right there'": dramatizing entropy in Tar Baby and Paradise / Herman Beavers -- Telling stories: evolving narrative identity in Toni Morrison's Home / Jan Furman -- "Newness trembles me"?: representations of white masculinity in Toni Morrison's A mercy / Mar Gallego-Durán -- The sound of change: a musical transit through the wounded modernity of Desdemona / Lenore Kitts -- Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo / Sonia Sanchez.
Summary:
"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 presented 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.""-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.