Justine Tally

Critical Approaches to Toni Morrison's Latest Novel

Literary Theory and All that Jazz

Carl Pedersen

Maria Diedrich

The world of African America extends throughout the northern, central, southern and insular parts of the American continent. The essays included in this volume take the creation of that world as a single object of study, tracing significant routes and contacts, building comparisons and contrasts. They thus participate in the reworking of traditional approaches to the study of history, the critique of literature and culture, and the production of knowledge. All are engaged in an effort to locate the African American experience within a wider pan-African vision that links the colonial with the postcolonial, the past with the present, the African with the Western. Mapping African America sketches lines that, far from limiting our geography, extend our knowledge of the Africanist influence on and their participation in what is generally called "Western" culture. This creative challenge to traditional disciplines will not only enhance the reader's understanding of African American Studies but will also help forge links with other academic fields of inquiry.

History, Narrative Formation, and the Production of Knowledge

Mapping African America

This work expands the scope of Morrison’s project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author’s specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization’s primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing from the very Heart of Africa. Despite the weight of "white" authority and the disparaging of "blackness," Beloved’s multiple "ghosts" conjure up a legacy so potent that no authoritarian discourse has been able to entirely erase it, a legacy that still speaks to us from a heritage we no longer acknowledge yet that nevertheless remains, and sustains us.

Origins

Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'

"In this first book-length study of Paradise, Justine Tally securely links the work to Morrison's entire oeuvre and effectively argues that while all of the novels of the trilogy are deeply analytical of the relationship of memory, story and history, the focus of this latest novel is the role of memory and story in the production of historical narrative: memory is fickle, story is unreliable, and history is subject to manipulation. A master narrative of the past is again dictated by the dominant discourse, but this time the control exerted is black and male, not white and male. Though this stranglehold threatens to deaden life and put the future on hold, Morrison's narrative disruptions challenge the very nature of this "paradise" on earth." "With these considerations, "Paradise" Reconsidered locates the author at the center of the on-going literary and cultural debates of the late 20th century: the post-modern discussion of history, particularly Afro-centrist history, the production of knowledge, the class divisions that are shattering the black community, and questions of "race" and essentialism. What does it mean to be "black"? And who is the white girl anyway?" --Book Jacket.

Toni Morrison's (hi)stories and Truths

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is one of the most widely studied of contemporary American authors. Her novels, particularly Beloved, have had a dramatic impact on the American canon and attracted considerable critical commentary. This 2007 Companion introduces and examines her oeuvre as a whole, the first evaluation to include not only her famous novels, but also her other literary works (short story, drama, musical, and opera), her social and literary criticism, and her career as an editor and teacher. Innovative contributions from internationally recognized critics and academics discuss Morrison's themes, narrative techniques, language and political philosophy, and explain the importance of her work to American studies and world literature. This comprehensive and accessible approach, together with a chronology and guide to further reading, makes this an essential book for students and scholars of African American literature.

The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison

Adrienne Lanier Seward

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 Homewithin 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.”

Memory and Meaning

Toni Morrison

Walter Hölbling

Theories and Texts, a guide written by students for students, explores the critical ideas of twelve of the most influential philosophers of the last 150 years - Marx, Freud, Bakhtin, Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Bhaba, as well as a variety of feminist critics (Kristeva & the French feminists, black feminists, and theological feminists), New Historicists, and Postcolonialists. Carefully "digested" and then set out in lucid and easily accessible language, these essays explain major ideas of each critical approach and exemplify them through practical application to one or more literary texts. At a time when "theory" is on everybody's lips and yet is often more of a deterrent than an attraction for students of literature and culture, these essays show how theories can enrich our understanding of literature, facilitate our analysis of a particular text, elucidate the multiple layers of meaning, and thus significantly enhance the juissance in our acts of reading.

For Students, by Students

Theories and Texts

Shirley A. Stave

Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, A Mercy, has been received with much acclaim by both the critical and lay reading public. Hailed as her best novel after the award-winning Beloved, most critics to date have concentrated on its setting in the late seventeenth century, a time in which, according to the author herself, slavery was “pre-racial,” a time before the “Terrible Transformation” irrevocably linked slavery to skin-color or “race.” Though a slender, easy to read novel, A Mercy is in fact a richly-layered text, full of multiple meanings and possibilities, a work of art that has only just begun to be “mined” for its critical import. The present volume is the first to deal with these possibilities, presenting a variety of critical approaches that include narrative theory, the eco-critical, the geographical, the allegorical, the Miltonian, the feminist, the metaphorical, and the Lacanian. As such, not only is it conceived to enrich the work of Morrison scholars and students, but also to illuminate the use of critical theory in elucidating a complex literary text. A Mercy clamors for close reading and thoughtful interrogation and promises to reward the perceptive reader.

Critical Approaches

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Since its publication in 1992, Jazz, probably Toni Morrison's most difficult novel to date, has illicited a wide array of critical response. Many of these analyses, while both thoughtful and thought-provoking, have provided only partial or inherently inconclusive interpretations. The title, and certain of the author's own pronouncements, have led other critics to focus on the music itself, both as medium and aesthetic support for the narration. Choosing an entirely different approach for The Story of Jazz, Justine Tally further develops her hypothesis, first elaborated in her study of Paradise, that the Morrison trilogy is undergirded by the relationship of history, memory and story, and discusses "jazz" not as the music, but as a metaphor for language and storytelling. Taking her cue from the author's epigraph for the novel, she discusses the relevance of storytelling to contemporary critics in many different fields, explains Morrison's choice of the hard-boiled detective genre as a ghost-text for her novel, and guides the reader through the intricacies of Bakhtinian theory in order to elucidate and ground her interpretation of this important text, finally entering into a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the novel which leads to a surprising conclusion.

Justine Tally

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