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Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Author: Melanie R. Anderson

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 2013-03-30

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1572339802

At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only “ghost story” among Toni Morrison’s nine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places abound in the celebrated author’s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses specters to bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories and experiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores. Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expanding notions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrison peoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectral figures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral to indicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and she employs the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalized and haunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectral presences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalized figure out of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between past and present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasingly more prominent in the novelist’s canon—from their beginnings in The Bluest Eye and Sula, to their flowering in the trilogy that comprises Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, and onward into A Mercy. An important contribution to the understanding of one of America’s premier fiction writers, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate’s powerful and challenging works give presence to the invisible, voice to the previously silenced, and agency to the oppressed outsiders who are refused a space in which to narrate their stories. Melanie R. Anderson is an Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Mississippi.

The Beloved Paradise

Author: Melanie R. Anderson

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13:

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Abstract: Of Toni Morrison's novels, Beloved (1987) would appear to be the only "ghost story," but spectral presences and places abound in her work. In this dissertation, I explore how Morrison uses specters in her fiction in order to presence African American culture and history. According to Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, "haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative" (Spectral America 5). In order to retrieve this narrative of lived African American history, Morrison peoples her novels with spectral figures that function as bridges, connecting individuals to their personal and cultural histories. I analyze Morrison's specters in the contexts of Latin American magical realism and of the African American literary tradition and through the critical lens of poststructuralism (in particular Derrida's theories of hauntology and spectrality). Deconstructing fixed Western binaries, I argue that the spectral plays a double role: it indicates power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and it also serves as a metaphor of erasure for characters who are dismissed by society and "ghosted," even though they are alive. The metaphor of the ghosted individual signals the absence of these people and their stories from the larger Western-oriented historical narrative, and it is the haunting of the specter that "unghosts" these elided individuals and creates links among past and present, life and death, and generations. Through the metaphoric power and the poststructural binary-dissolving possibilities of the specter, Morrison pursues her cultural work of presencing the actual lived experience of African American history in America and those individuals who lived it.

Ghostly Alterities. Spectrality and Contemporary Literatures in English

Author: Bianca DelVillano

Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press

Published: 2012-02-24

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 3838257146

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Ghostly Alterities analyses the meaning of ghostliness in contemporary Anglophone novels – Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes (1998), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2002), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995) – in which the figure of the ghost is often entrusted with the task of questioning Western culture and history. After an introductory chapter which investigates Freud’s concept of the uncanny along with theoretical issues raised by Iain Chambers and Jacques Derrida, Ghostly Alterities discusses the novels from different critical orientations (postcolonialism, poststructuralism and psychoanalysis), presenting ghostliness as intersecting with three major themes: the problem of the spectre’s visibility and “bodily” nature; the particular melancholic state of mind the ghost can trigger which brings about a very special kind of (g)hospitality; the spectral nature of history and its relationship with the characters’ personal memory.

Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature

Author: María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-14

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 3319617591

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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.

Toni Morrison and the Natural World

Author: Anissa Janine Wardi

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2021-06-28

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1496834186

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Critics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison’s work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate’s novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature. Morrison’s ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.

Monstrous Textualities

Author: Anya Heise-von der Lippe

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1786837609

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It brings together a range of critical approaches (the Gothic, monster theory, critical posthumanism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, feminist theory, fat studies, cyborg theory) including very recent forays into posthumanist / new materialist intersections It contributes new readings to the critical canon on a wide range of critically acclaimed texts (from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein via Toni Morrison’s and Angela Carter’s work to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy) It explores narrative strategies of resistance against systemic cultural oppression and challenges a number of critical approaches in the process

Shirley Jackson, Influences and Confluences

Author: Melanie R. Anderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1317055268

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The popularity of such widely known works as "The Lottery" and The Haunting of Hill House has tended to obscure the extent of Shirley Jackson's literary output, which includes six novels, a prodigious number of short stories, and two volumes of domestic sketches. Organized around the themes of influence and intertextuality, this collection places Jackson firmly within the literary cohort of the 1950s. The contributors investigate the work that informed her own fiction and discuss how Jackson inspired writers of literature and film. The collection begins with essays that tease out what Jackson's writing owes to the weird tale, detective fiction, the supernatural tradition, and folklore, among other influences. The focus then shifts to Jackson's place in American literature and the impact of her work on women's writing, campus literature, and the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel. The final two essays examine adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House and Jackson's influence on contemporary American horror cinema. Taken together, the essays offer convincing evidence that half a century following her death, readers and writers alike are still finding value in Jackson’s words.

Goodness and the Literary Imagination

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0813943639

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What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

Spectrality and Temporality

Author: Leila Afrasiabi

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This thesis investigates the intersections of textual dynamics with reader response in Wuthering Heights and Beloved. Beloved, a recent novel by Toni Morrison, has been read as a political text interrogating racial inequality since its time of publication. Comparatively, Wuthering Heights, a canonical nineteenth-century novel by Emily Brontë, has been seriously neglected as an attempt to pioneer women rights. This thesis tries to unveil how the use of particular textual and rhetorical techniques in both novels address certain audiences. In particular, the enframed ghost story is used as a compelling device to bring in readerly attention in both texts. Also, because both novels present a non-linear temporal progression, they can be deemed fine examples of narrative temporality in relation to reader responses to the texts. Although Wuthering Heights and Beloved are obviously published in two distinct sociopolitical contexts, it is worthwhile to examine their textual dynamics in relation to their authors' marginalized status within each individual society because both texts use comparable structural elements. The present study considers the temporal framing technique of the two narratives as a textual device to alter readers' responses to both texts. While temporality is considered a major thematic instrument, the presence of a ghost character is also increasingly defining. The use of a ghost story together with the framing narrative technique, which results in a sort of concurrent temporality, serves as a conflated textual device in both narratives. These conflated categories intertwine, leading to a reconfiguration of the concepts of self and other on the part of readers. In this manner, these two writers succeed in bringing their readers to their own side of the struggle for recognition, equality and identity.

Horror Literature through History [2 volumes]

Author: Matt Cardin

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-09-21

Total Pages: 1004

ISBN-13:

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This two-volume set offers comprehensive coverage of horror literature that spans its deep history, dominant themes, significant works, and major authors, such as Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice, as well as lesser-known horror writers. Many of today's horror story fans—who appreciate horror through movies, television, video games, graphic novels, and other forms—probably don't realize that horror literature is not only one of the most popular types of literature but one of the oldest. People have always been mesmerized by stories that speak to their deepest fears. Horror Literature through History shows 21st-century horror fans the literary sources of their favorite entertainment and the rich intrinsic value of horror literature in its own right. Through profiles of major authors, critical analyses of important works, and overview essays focused on horror during particular periods as well as on related issues such as religion, apocalypticism, social criticism, and gender, readers will discover the fascinating early roots and evolution of horror writings as well as the reciprocal influence of horror literature and horror cinema. This unique two-volume reference set provides wide coverage that is current and compelling to modern readers—who are of course also eager consumers of entertainment. In the first section, overview essays on horror during different historical periods situate works of horror literature within the social, cultural, historical, and intellectual currents of their respective eras, creating a seamless narrative of the genre's evolution from ancient times to the present. The second section demonstrates how otherwise unrelated works of horror have influenced each other, how horror subgenres have evolved, and how a broad range of topics within horror—such as ghosts, vampires, religion, and gender roles—have been handled across time. The set also provides alphabetically arranged reference entries on authors, works, and specialized topics that enable readers to zero in on information and concepts presented in the other sections.