Morrison's Work Research Articles

Double Consciousness: A Subject Formation in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

This paper based on Toni Morrison's "Tar Baby" delves into the intricacies of race, identity, and belonging. It explores the expressions of double consciousness in Morrison's work and its significance in understanding the characters' motivations and relationships. It employs W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness as a literary tool to describe the internal conflict experienced by African Americans. Double consciousness refers to the psychological experience of African Americans who perceive themselves both as individuals and as members of a racially marginalized group. This duality arises from the social construction of race and the historical context of oppression, leading to a fragmented identity. The female protagonist, Jadine Childs, embodies the struggle of double consciousness as a young, educated black woman. She gets divided between her African heritage and the allure of white culture. Her relationship with Son, a male protagonist, serves as a catalyst for her exploration of self-awareness and cultural identity. This study examines how Morrison portrays the internal conflicts faced by her characters. Additionally, it navigates the reasons behind the formation of split personality of the characters. It also discovers the role of history and memory in shaping the characters' perceptions. Over all, this research contributes the readers to comprehend how double consciousness acts in order to formulate fragmented personality of the black characters.

Rethinking the Nexus: Eco-feminist Discourse on Femininity, Nature, and the 'Other' in Morrison and Hurston’s Works

The patriarchal norm is seen as being threatened by powerful women (Normandin, 2020). This study pens down the ecofeminist discourse found in Morrison's and Hurston's literary works. This scrutiny examines how these significant writers confront the devaluation of the feminine, nature, and the "Other," focusing on Morrison's "Beloved" and "Song of Solomon" and Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Morrison deftly interweaves the challenges of African American women with the natural environment In a similar vein, Hurston emphasizes the interconnectedness of race, gender, and ecology in her writing, which is firmly anchored in African American folklore and tells a story that links women's experiences to the natural world. Amid social and ecological issues, this scrutiny invites readers to reevaluate the ties between women, nature, and society systems by highlighting the fundamental interconnection addressed in their works.

Renormalization group methods: Which kind of explanation?

Renormalization and Renormalization Group (RG) have proven to be very powerful tools in contemporary physics, with a decisive influence on how to conceive of key physical aspects, including theories themselves. While they can be tackled from a variety of standpoints, this paper focuses on a specific philosophical issue, that is, which kind of explanation can be provided by means of RG methods. After a short, historical overview to set out the physical context, we scrutinize recent debates on the topic, with a particular focus on Morrison's seminal work. With respect to her account, where RG explanation is portrayed as mathematical, non-reductive, and non-causal, our focus is on the first aspect. Our claim is that RG theory's explanatory role cannot reside exclusively in its mathematical character, independently from a physical interpretation: mathematical and physical features intersect in a highly non-trivial way to provide an explanation of physical phenomena.

Xenophobiain morrison's the bluest eye, sula & song of solomon

This paperanalyses Toni Morrison's attempts in three of her novels, The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and Song of Solomon (1975), to define the activities of the black community (1977). Toni Morrison's works have often portrayed black people from the perspective of a powerful white community and its values. The Bluest Eye incidents occur in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison's birthplace. In this book, the black town of Lorain is kept far away from the upper-class white community of Lake Shore Park, which is likewise regarded as a place where black people are not allowed. Sula takes place in a small Ohio town called Bottom, named for its location at the base of a hill. The captivating black community of Song of Solomon is its own creature, apart from but never far distant from the white society. The novel's opening chapters explain "Not Doctor Street" and "No Mercy Hospital." Both Mains Avenue and Mercy Hospital are commonly utilized by African Americans but are not officially acknowledged by the white city authorities. In a sense, Song of Solomon takes place in a made-up city somewhere in the United States, possibly in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Virginia. The study shows that white neighbourhoods are constantly situated next to black ones, serving as a benchmark and a tool for oppressing and exploiting the black population.Since Morrison is a black writer, this comparison is essentially a search for self—that occurs repeatedly in her works.

Transpopular Spaces: Gypsy Imageries in the Work of Van Morrison

The work of Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison has gone relatively unnoticed by critics despite the numerous social, literary and artistic elements included in his songs. Among them is the representation of the figure of the Gypsy as a model of action for generations of listeners who were concerned about countercultural dynamics, as well as alternative life models to those that were legitimized by the middle class of the time. The objective of this study is to analyze the romanticized component that is presented in Morrison's work around his conceptualization of gypsyism, as well as to observe how these elements generate, firstly, a deontologizing function in the Gypsy figure, and then a resignification of the spaces in transit occupied by the imagination(s) of this community as a nomadic people.To carry out this analysis, several songs from the first albums of the Northern Irish author will be examined, and we will explain the function of representing the Gypsy in the countercultural spatial environment of their epistemology.

Intimacy and Opposition of Females in the Community of Toni Morrison's Works

Intimacy and Opposition of Females in the Community of Toni Morrison's Works

Buddhist Apologetics in East Asia: Countering the Neo-Confucian Critiques in the Hufa lun and the Yusŏk chirŭi non by Uri Kaplan

Reviewed by: Buddhist Apologetics in East Asia: Countering the Neo-Confucian Critiques in the Hufa lun and the Yusŏk chirŭi non by Uri Kaplan A. Charles Muller Buddhist Apologetics in East Asia: Countering the Neo-Confucian Critiques in the Hufa lun and the Yusŏk chirŭi non, by Uri Kaplan, Leiden: Brill, 2019, viii + 273 pp. Scholarly discourse on the content and background of Confucian-Buddhist debates, polemic, and apologetics has occurred in fits and starts over a period of decades, despite the seminal role of this discourse in the development of the intellectual history of China, Korea, and Japan (and no doubt Vietnam, if a study were undertaken to take account of the situation there). Modern Western academic treatments of this phenomenon began within the landmark volumes on Neo-Confucianism published by de Bary and others during the eighties and nineties. Since the attack on Buddhism was an integral part of the development of the Neo-Confucian project, most of the major figures in the Neo-Confucian movement assailed Buddhism in writing at one point or another. Since no sustained work on the Buddhist responses was done during this period, for a time awareness of this issue in the West was received mainly in terms of the Neo-Confucian polemic, and not in the context of any kind of Buddhist response. Elizabeth Morrison's 2010 monograph, The Power of Patriarchs (Brill), contained a solid discussion that not only elaborated the response by the Song Chan monk Qisong (1007–1072), but also contextualized well the nature and background of Chinese Buddhist apologetics—and apologists on a broader scale. Morrison's work focused on the situation in Song China. My own work, Korea's Great Buddhist-Confucian Debate (University of Hawai'i Press, 2015), attempted to shed light on the philosophical background that framed the Chinese/Korean Neo-Confucianism/Buddhism debate, but did not thoroughly investigate the historical development of this debate from its earliest origins, or attempt to summarize the major representative works in China, Korea, and Japan. [End Page 173] In Uri Kaplan's Buddhist Apologetics we have the first thoroughgoing, complete effort to explicate the content and character of the back-and-forth between (Neo-)Confucians and Buddhists, from their first encounters before the Tang, through the Song, and into Koryŏ and Chosŏn Korea. He also briefly introduces the Japanese Edo-period manifestations of this debate. Kaplan takes as the centerpiece of his work two well-known and influential works, one from China (Hufa lun 護法論; T 2114; rendered as "In Defense of the Dharma") and one from Korea (Yusŏk chirŭi non 儒釋質疑論; HPC 7.252–278; rendered as "Doubts and Concerns Between Buddhism and Confucianism"); these he translates and annotates with a skill, erudition, and faithfulness deserving of accolades. He supports these translations with a substantial, well-organized, and well-argued introduction, which provides what is by far the most magisterial discussion of East Asian Buddhist apologetics to be submitted to date, one which I suspect will not be surpassed for some time to come. The introduction starts with a discussion of the earliest Chinese Buddhist polemics, foregrounding the all-important Buddhist notion of karma treated through early inter-traditional works such as the Hongming ji (T 2122). Part 2 then moves into the origins of the Neo-Confucian critique of Buddhism, starting from the rather simplistic diatribes of Han Yu (768–824), expanded by Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), and then developed in philosophical sophistication through the writings of Neo-Confucian founders Zhang Zai (1020–1077), Cheng Hao (1032–1085), and Cheng Yi (1033–1107), culminating in the Neo-Confucian synthesis of Zhu Xi (1130–1200). As I tried to point out in my own work, there was a considerable philosophical/semantic quagmire involved in these discussions, since most of the philosophically interesting disputes were rooted in the difference between Buddhist and Confucian system-based interpretations of such key terms as mind (心), emotions (情), nature (性), essencefunction (體用), and so forth. Kaplan then shows how this discussion was transferred to Korea, where Koryŏ and Chosŏn Neo-Confucians revived Zhu Xi's arguments, culminating in a final comprehensive summary of the Neo-Confucian arguments by Ch...

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: On Antiracism

Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting:On Antiracism Thadious M. Davis (bio) One of the ways in which racism functions so efficiently and continuously is in its ability to obscure, deny, or ignore what majority culture appropriates and takes from minority cultures. That strategy often results in an accepted popular wisdom that minorities produce and create little of value and that they themselves are largely valueless. In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, scholars forged ahead with changing such perceptions and recognizing minority contributions; the more obvious recognitions were in terms of music and popular culture. But it is much different in literary studies. Critics generously observe how majority writers contribute to work of minority authors. Rarely is there a mention of the reverse. How often are students of literature reminded that Toni Morrison wrote her masters thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf? Yet are they routinely told of the white writers who found their inspiration in Morrison's works? I attempted to forward the reverse discourse in "Lingering in the Black: Faulkner's Illegible Modernist Sound Melding" by focusing on how William Faulkner early on found actual models and inspiration in the published works of Black writers and in the sounds those Black writers voiced in their characters and art. In that essay for the 2013 Faulkner conference on "Faulkner and the Black Literatures of America," I also pointed to other modernist literary critics, such as Michael North, Laura Winkiel, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen, who have made important forays into explicating patterns of the reverse flow of materials from minority to majority writers. Typically they pursued the ways in which Black orality filtered into the work of white modernism writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. While signaling the significance of these scholarly contributions in reading the relationship of white writers to Black voice and vernacular, I wanted especially to foreground that in his early writings Faulkner had entered an intersubjective space that involved published texts written by [End Page 131] Black authors. Faulkner indeed acknowledged Black storytellers from his youth and admitted to listening and imitating their oral tales, in essence an acceptance of vernacular orality related to his own Southern heritage.1 However, he never acknowledged reading or paying attention to writers at the start of his career, even though later in the 1940s he could not avoid acknowledging that he read Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) at the height of that novel's popularity and subsequently Black Boy (1945) as well.2 An acknowledgment of reading Black contemporaries in the 1920s and 1930s would have meant a recognition of their formal contribution to the literary culture within the dominant white establishment, rather than a consignment only to participation in an oral folk culture. It is not merely a question related to earlier notions of access to literacy at stake for Black people; it is instead a matter of admission of racial parity in one form of creative and intellectual work. Or, if not parity, then at least an understanding that Black writers had access, albeit limited access, to some of the very same outlets for their materials as white writers, and perhaps an understanding, too, that in artistic production Black people had literary ability and creativity. Largely self-educated, Faulkner certainly read the popular writers of his day. Aspiring poets, like the young William Faulkner, particularly witnessed the celebration of trendy writers in new little magazines and in book publications. Though today we rarely think of Black writers as being popular or even as being published contemporaneously with Faulkner, often simultaneously in the same magazines and outlets, that was indeed the case. In the 1920s, Jean Toomer's poetry appeared in The Double-Dealer: A National Magazine that also published Hart Crane, H. D., Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and Faulkner's own poetic sketches. And in 1925, for example, Countee Cullen won the Witter Brynner Prize in Poetry sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, but he had already won second place in both 1923 and 1924 while an undergraduate. Cullen's poems appeared in Harper's, Poetry, and The Bookman, as well as in Crisis and Opportunity, and Harper...

Race Identity in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

This paper aims at analyzing Toni Morrison's work Tar Baby. We are going to apply the post-colonial theory to deal with the issues of racial identity. Also, we are going to focus on the binary opposition as one of the main concern of post-colonialism to analyze the relationship between blacks and whites. This analysis is based on the actions, thoughts, and behaviors of the major characters to deal with the problem of racism and identity.

‘‘They could defecate over a whole people […] and defecate some more by tearing up the land”: Ecological (Un) consciousness and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Selected Novels

This paper aims to deconstruct Toni Morrison’s selected novels through the lenses of ecocriticism. It looks at her work from an ecocritical angle. Sula has traditionally been read as a story about female friendship ;Song of Solomon has been critically acclaimed for its vivid capture of African American cultural heritage ; Tar Baby is regarded as a masterpiece because of its high folkloric resonance ; Beloved is perceived as a survey of the horrors of slavery ; Paradise is regarded as the narrative of contemporary communities confronted with great social changes, while A Mercy is considered to be a story of black women slaves’ struggles to gain freedom in America in the 1600s. Historically, critics have attempted to perceive Morrison’s fiction from the socio-historical lens that has little to do with Nature. However, Nature serves as a background to Morrison's work. It not only serves as imagery but more of a living being that reacts to human exploitation. Morrison's selected novels highlight diverse aspects of this human versus nature relationship that deserves an in-depth analysis. In fact, these novels provide ample evidence that the author sees ecosensitivity and ecological consciousness as possible ways to curb environmental degradation. This paper posits the nonhuman world encoded in Morrison’s novels. It maintains that Morrison’s fiction could raise awareness about ecological wisdom which is key to understanding and solving the current environmental challenges.

Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home” in Toni Morrison's Home

ABSTRACT This article argues that there is a utopian impulse animating the work of Toni Morrison that is best manifest in the figure of “home.” It turns to utopian scholars, Morrison scholars, and Morrison herself to theorize home-as-utopia in Morrison's work and discusses the novel in which it finds its fullest expression, 2012's Home. It explicates how, against a demythologizing dystopian portrayal of 1950s America, Morrison posits utopia not as an ideal or blueprint, or as an enclave or other space, but instead as an everyday ethical practice. It links Morrison's idea of home to Ernst Bloch's concept of heimat as well as what Lucy Sargisson describes as “a system of social exchange … marked by the desire to give.” It thus sheds light on the “home” that, according to Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, “has provided an ongoing hopeful thread interweaving [Morrison's] novels” and defines Morrison's search for “paradise.”

ANGLOSAKSONSKA POP KULTURA U ROMANU SAVETI MORISONOVOG UČENIKA OBOŽAVATELJU DŽOJSA ROBERTA BOLANJA I A. G. PORTE

Predmet našeg istraživanja je prvi roman čileanskog pisca Roberta Bolanja Consejos de un discípulo de Morrison a un fanático de Joyce (Saveti Morisonovog učenika obožavatelju Džojsa), nastao u saradnji sa njegovim prijateljem, katalonskim književnikom Antonijem Garsijom Portom i objavljen 1984. godine. Temeljnom analizom dela koje sadrži sve potonje teme kojima će se Bolanjo baviti do kraja života (književnost, nasilje, smrt, ljubav, umetnost, kriminal, društvo, muzika), proučili smo elemente anglosaksonske popularne kulture kojima ova knjiga obiluje, a naročito reference na irskog književnika Džejmsa Džojsa i američkog pesnika i muzičara Džima Morisona. Budući da prvi roman Bolanja i Porte do sada nije preveden na srpski niti analiziran u akademskim člancima na našim prostorima, služili smo se literaturom na španskom i engleskom jeziku, zapisima Bolanja i Porte, novijim studijama hispanoameričke književnosti, kao i stručnim knjigama i tekstovima na srpskom jeziku o popularnoj kulturi i Džojsovom i Morisonovom stvaralaštvu. Zaključci do kojih smo došli mogu se svesti na sledeće: život na margini dvoje protagonista, Ane i Anhela, i njihova neprestana težnja da „provale na drugu stranu”, dva (alter ega) umetnika iz naslova romana koji samo na prvi pogled deluju kao dva kontrapunkta, omogućili su autorima romana da otvore svoja „vrata percepcije” zarad eksperimentisanja književnom formom (Džojs) odnosno samim životom (Morison).

Breaking the Back of Words: Sound and Subversion in Toni Morrison's Beloved*

Breaking the Back of WordsSound and Subversion in Toni Morrison's Beloved* Jonquil Bailey (bio) I wanted … the books … to have an effortlessness and an artlessness, and a non-book quality, so that they would have a sound. —Toni Morrison, Interview with Toni Morrison To find the words to speak the unspeakable about slave experience and memory in her novels, Toni Morrison infuses her writing politically with sound, producing an aural literary aesthetic that challenges master narratives. Indeed, she reimagines the narratives of slave men and women that have been lost to history, recovering what Karla F.C. Holloway calls "the language of creative generation" by appropriating and reformulating the English language to challenge its discursive power.1 As Morrison conveys in her groundbreaking study Playing in the Dark, language is inseparably bound up with the dominant ideology, making it particularly difficult for othered writers to employ interventions that challenge its "hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive 'othering' of [marginalized] people and language."2 Morrison argues that such othered writers must "free up the language" in imagination (which is inextricably tied to words) to prevail over the Eurocentric tendency to employ literary conventions that reinforce racial hierarchy.3 In her own work, Morrison attempts "to unhobble the imagination" by giving prominence not to words, but to sound.4 As she gathers, reimagines, and rearticulates fragments of [End Page 28] slave experience in her novels, she employs an aural writing practice to create narratives of slave history that resist prevailing interpretations of the past. In her 1987 novel Beloved, Morrison applies her aural literary strategy to reveal the danger of words and the hope of sound, the raw material of language. Recent critics of the novel attend to the function of sound in Baby Suggs's sermon in the Clearing, which generally has been interpreted as liberating and consonant with other instances of restorative sound initiated by other women characters.5 As productive as this scholarship has been for understanding the relationships among community, spirituality, and the transgressive power of sound in Morrison's work, such interpretations gloss over the significant problems of Baby Suggs's theology, including how it provokes resentment among her friends and neighbors and informs their conspicuous failure to warn her ahead of Schoolteacher's raid. Baby Suggs's social isolation and lethal emotional breakdown following the community's betrayal reveal that her theology—particularly her Call—is ultimately a failure. Although Baby Suggs challenges white Christian discourses in her sermon and attempts to create a new model of grace for the Bluestone community, her rhetoric of love is not far enough removed from white biblical language and its racialized ideologies. Alert to the danger inherent in white doctrine yet unaware of its tenacity, Baby Suggs advances a passive, romantic approach to resistance that grossly underestimates the full scope and scale of oppression against her community. If we treat Baby Suggs's Clearing theology as a problem rather than a solution, it becomes clear that Ella's ruthlessly anti-white supremacist and unromantic spirituality—which succeeds in exorcising Beloved—is much better suited to empower blacks and combat internalized white theology. I argue that Ella's intervention at the exorcism is thematically designed to expose and correct the problems of Baby Suggs's romanticized vision of grace. Tellingly, Ella acts rather than sermonizes and uses sounds rather than words when she confronts Beloved. Juxtaposing Ella and Baby Suggs's theological outlooks as they concern white patriarchal religious language, I advance a critique of Morrison's "auditory subversion" that reveals the sociopolitical complexities and risks of adopting a white hegemonic discourse. I am not suggesting that Morrison uses Baby Suggs and Ella to make a blanket claim against the use of language (the author, after all, has chosen the written English language as her mode of communication). Rather, I argue that Morrison employs auditory subversion to register the hidden pitfalls to which any attempt at challenging the dominant discourse is vulnerable. Ella's theological approach is ultimately more effective than Baby Suggs's, if only because she recognizes the magnitude of white supremacist ideology and seeks to survive rather than transcend it. At...

‘My Tongue Gets t-t-t-’: Words, Sense, and Vocal Presence in Van Morrison'sIt's Too Late to Stop Now

AbstractVan Morrison's live version of his song ‘Cyprus Avenue’ on the 1974 albumIt's Too Late to Stop Nowprovides an example of the authority of the singer's voice and of how it leads and demands submission from musicians, songs, and audience. Morrison's voice constantly suggests that it is reflecting important experience and can be understood both as an attempt to capture something and as a post-hoc witnessing or testimony. Through the example of Morrison's work, and ofIt's Too Late to Stop Nowin particular, this article explores the location of the voice in terms of the body and of particular places and histories. It then proceeds to a reflection on the relationship between the performing voice as producer of sound, noise, and music and the poetic voice that provides the words and visions upon which the performing voice goes to work. It concludes by focusing on a moment within ‘Cyprus Avenue’ where Morrison performs the act of being tongue-tied, discussing this as an example of ‘aesthetic stutter’. Throughout, attention is also paid to how other voices (particularly those of rock critics) connect to Morrison's voice by attempting to describe it, re-perform it, or explain it.

Orpheus of Nitrate: The Emergence of Bill Morrison

This interview took place between December 2015 and January 2016.Bill Morrison has been a filmmaker since 1992; he made films before this, but until Footprints (1992), he had not devoted himself to filmmaking. He has been prolific: the filmography on his website currently lists thirty-nine films he calls his own-though most of the films have been collaborations with composers/ musicians. This distinguishes Morrison from nearly all other filmmakers, both as an artist-making-films and an artist-in-the-world. In many instances, others have instigated what become Morrison's filmmaking projects: the Ridge Theater group in Manhattan, early on; the composers/musicians he has worked with; and, more recently, programmers who commission Morrison and a composer to produce a work for a specific occasion. In recent years, the collaborations have involved interaction from the conception ofprojects through (often after) their premieres. These collaborative works are as likely to premiere at music events as at film festivals.The other major element of Morrison's work that distinguishes it from nearly all other cinema is his fascination with the process of film decay and its results and opportunities. Morrison is of course not the first filmmaker to be interested in decayed films; his seeing Peter Delpeut's Lyrical Nitrate (1991) at New York's Film Forum in 1992 revealed to him how decay might function as a contribution to the production of a new kind of found-footage cinema. In general, Morrison's films combine the montage approach of recontextualizing earlier imagery-pioneered by Esfir Shub, Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, and Raphael Montanez Ortiz- with the alteration of found images over time through chemical transformation. That is, most of Morrison's films involve at least two collaborators: whichever musician/composer he's working with and Time itself (in recent years he has also needed the collaboration of the technicians who make digital versions of the original material he decides to use, and, of course, since he has usually worked with found materials, the original filmmakers were unknowingly collaborating with Morrison long before he was born).Though Morrison's work feels less like fiction film and documentary than like what is usually called avant-garde or experimental cinema, he is often not understood as a significant contributor to this tradition. For some cineastes, critics, and programmers, the collaborative nature of Morrison's work and the fact that he neither shoots his own footage nor is responsible for the look of the footage he uses seems to problematize the idea that he is a filmmaker. Where is Bill Morrison in these works ? But just as Bruce Conner's films resonate Bruce Conner, Morrison's films have been distinctive at least since his first major foray into working with film decay: Decasia (2002; inducted into the National Film Registry in 2013)-even though, like Conner's films, Morrison's vary considerably in subject and tone.Ultimately, Morrison can be understood as a cine-alchemist who transforms trash into cinematic gold, or as a mad scientist who creates new beings from the shards of past cinematic bodies, or as a magician who reverses the process of bringing what looked to be dead back to momentary life. Of course, as soon as Morrison has completed the transformation of a represented past into a new present, his cine-reincarnation reenters the process of decay: even if digitization has allowed emulsion-based motion-picture imagery to transcend its physical origins, the cine-reincarnation enters that giant cloud where in time it too will disappear from memory. Ultimately, Morrison's confrontations with film decay function both as demonstrations that, as Gunvor Nelson has said, There is beauty in decay, and as metaphors for the quest, shared by artists and nonartists alike, to transcend mortality: in Morrison's work it is clear that the inevitability of decay is the instigator of imagination and creativity. …

Popular Reception of Toni Morrison's Beloved:

ABSTRACT: I present a snapshot of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved from a personally experienced, particularly significant cultural moment in the public and academic discourse. I argue that Buppies (Black Urban Professionals), children of the turbulent sixties as readers, were meaningful precursors to the appropriately serious literary (aesthetic) reception of Morrison's work. In the case of the novel and the film, this popular reception was actually an embryonic response that bolstered an academic one, resulting in considerable overlap between these two interpretative communities. The initial popular reception propelled the text firmly into the arms of the academy, where it has settled into a long-lasting embrace. Pulling from the work of reception studies scholars like Patrocino Schweikart, this study connects the American Black Power Movement of the ’60s and the subsequent emergence of Black Studies programs to the reception of the text and its film adaptation, as well as incorporating Morrison's own words on interpretative interaction between readers and her work.

/Co/operation and /co/mmunity in /co/mics: 4chan's Hypercrisis

The Hypercrisis—an online attempt by fans of DC Comics to create an overarching story across the entirety of the history of the comic company's line—provides insight into online comic book fandom. Comic fans on 4chan (http://4chan.org) began noticing connections between this overarching story and the canon of comics writer Grant Morrison's work. However, the Hypercrisis is entirely fan made; it is not a part of DC Comics's continuity and not necessarily a part of the possible published futures of the comics; nor is it officially part of Morrison's work. However, the fans continue to create and discuss the developing Hypercrisis, providing deep analysis and intricate images. Part of what makes this process interesting is that it is developed and maintained entirely by an anonymous Internet group. Further, it focuses on the work of one particular creator, Grant Morrison. Because of the brief display time, no one on 4chan knows or is able to maintain any consistent relationship to any other user. Yet the Hypercrisis has remained a prominent and powerful part of this particular Web culture. The group has maintained this theoretical event, exhibiting remarkable consistency and a nuanced understanding of the texts. The group's analyses explore important aspects relating to Morrison's work and to DC Comics.

A New Midwesternism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"ScholarlyArticle","@id":"https://read.dukeupress.edu/twentieth-century-lit/article/59/1/104/22723/A-New-Midwesternism-in-Toni-Morrison-s-The-Bluest","name":"A New Midwesternism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye","datePublished":"2013-03-01","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://read.dukeupress.edu/twentieth-century-lit/issue/59/1","@type":"PublicationIssue","issueNumber":"1","datePublished":"2013-03-01","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://read.dukeupress.edu/twentieth-century-lit","@type":"Periodical","name":"Twentieth-Century Literature","issn":["2325-8101"]}},"url":"https://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2013-2009","inLanguage":"en","copyrightHolder":"","copyrightYear":"2022","publisher":"","sameAs":"","author":[{"name":"Long, Lisa A.","@type":"Person"}],"description":"","pageStart":"104","pageEnd":"125","siteName":"Duke University Press","thumbnailURL":"https://dup.silverchair-cdn.com/dup/Content_public/Journal/twentieth-century-lit/Issue/59/1/3/m_ddtcl_59_1_cover.png?Expires=1721557288&Signature=yfuzfC-u1OJO2SUsJTyG5Xfd2KFjZPh270Rbc4-Tuze7JRgN5CNGeTL6LlZNQVmtY5Tn68ck9KaNMkGINgXXKX1XlrcVX9tkTGRju2x~y5isZ3r7y-QId-qcCG2J8UUTLaTHdZMGC2G4D-wXbVS5DpJwwNCAsgTU9d8ocA3bQQUgL46HWyUZWzaE48eUZ-LwR7BAmBDuY29~WwURe4lQU5PdWhVF-qFpY9bSkSb0ZdvODTPqLcjESF~aqOemMBY4z1k~Z2oZ~KysuS~NQQkaGiHuMnNqzC3KAVayNx0OC-dFFSvN6aob7kuhQkD1QYJKUJjuOjk3134zh4nFnipLoQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA","headline":"A New Midwesternism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye","image":"https://dup.silverchair-cdn.com/dup/Content_public/Journal/twentieth-century-lit/Issue/59/1/3/m_ddtcl_59_1_cover.png?Expires=1721557288&Signature=yfuzfC-u1OJO2SUsJTyG5Xfd2KFjZPh270Rbc4-Tuze7JRgN5CNGeTL6LlZNQVmtY5Tn68ck9KaNMkGINgXXKX1XlrcVX9tkTGRju2x~y5isZ3r7y-QId-qcCG2J8UUTLaTHdZMGC2G4D-wXbVS5DpJwwNCAsgTU9d8ocA3bQQUgL46HWyUZWzaE48eUZ-LwR7BAmBDuY29~WwURe4lQU5PdWhVF-qFpY9bSkSb0ZdvODTPqLcjESF~aqOemMBY4z1k~Z2oZ~KysuS~NQQkaGiHuMnNqzC3KAVayNx0OC-dFFSvN6aob7kuhQkD1QYJKUJjuOjk3134zh4nFnipLoQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA","image:alt":"Issue Cover"}

Florens in Salem

Florens in Salem Kristina Bross (bio) Reading A Mercy in an undergraduate class focused on seventeenth-century magical belief made for an alchemical experience. When I have taught the book in other kinds of courses, students took Florens's belief in the supernatural, particularly her reports of signs and omens, as idiosyncratic, expressions of a particular ignorant or wounded character within a culture like our own, built on a rational understanding of the world. Placing Morrison's work next to wonder tales and witchcraft [End Page 183] trials, however, we experienced a kind of sympathetic vibration in which both the novel and its historical antecedents seem sharper and more resonant. I used the novel as a capstone text for students in an upper-level undergraduate course I entitled "Witchcraft and Wonder in Early American Literature," a course that surveyed three moments of wonder or magic in colonial New England: the Antinomian controversy, the Salem witchcraft outbreak, and the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic. Among the students' assignments was a response paper discussing how the history of witchcraft in America is used in Morrison's novel.4 My aim was simple: to find out which elements of our historical study had stayed with them, and by applying that historical study to a contemporary work, to prompt them to see the ways that their study of the past could be used in criticism of contemporary events and culture. Having read of monstrous births, babies with scales and horns who were the direct reflection of the mother's heresies; of witchy descriptions of ghostly, glowing jellyfish laid out on a fireplace mantle; of animals and children struck down by a look, my students were primed to read all kinds of wonders as possible within Morrison's historical-fictional universe, set as it is in the years leading up to the Salem witchcraft trials. They approached A Mercy with a suspension of disbelief in which a kettle's steam really can shape itself into a dog's head omen, men's spirits actually do rise from their graves, and young girls are bewitched by strange men. Returning to the historic materials after reading the novel, they took from Morrison a sense of the poignancy of the situation in Salem in 1692. Reading historical accounts of wonder caused them to suspend disbelief as they read of Florens's magical signs or Rebekka's ghosts. Moreover, after reading Morrison, they seemed to find it easier to see how the seventeenth-century belief in an enchanted universe permeated all who were involved, that accusations of witchcraft were not (always) in bad faith, even if the results were scandalous, and that scapegoating is never a simple or straightforward evil. For this short essay, I want to focus on the reading we constructed together of chapter 7, one of Florens's chapters, in which Florens journeys into the wilderness in search of her blacksmith lover, finds a night's refuge in the house of Widow Ealing and her daughter Jane, and becomes the focus of a witch hunt. Florens's journey takes place in 1690, just two years before the Salem witchcraft trials began. My students noticed immediately [End Page 184] details that had not struck me as significant in my earlier readings. For instance, the chapter opens with Florens's portentous dream of "cherry trees walking toward me. . . . One bends down and I wake with a little scream in my mouth" (101). We knew from our reading of David Hall's Worlds of Wonder that such dreams were often taken as supernatural signs in the seventeenth century. Florens wakes to realize that "nothing is different," but my students nonetheless read the wild landscape as haunted: a clearing "remember[s] the burning of itself " (102). The air is filled with "bird talk"—which my students thought resonated with Salem accounts of familiars in the shape of little yellow birds. Even her encounter with flesh-and-blood people, young Native men who give her food and water, partakes of the magical: "I blink and they all disappear" (103). Soon after, Florens leaves the haunted landscape of the wilderness and lands in a proto-Salem village, just two years before the historic...

Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature Terence Tucker Brian Norman . Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. vii + 214 pp. At first glance, Brian Norman's Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature would seem to be an extension of Kenneth Warren's thesis that African American literature is at an end, a claim based on the idea that African American literature is inseparable from and beholden to its relationship with white America and white oppression during the Jim Crow years after Reconstruction and before the Voting Rights Act. Warren's claims are part of a larger push to proclaim a "postracial" moment, an argument that conflates the end of de jure segregation with the end of Jim Crow. Yet one of the primary elements of the celebration of diversity and postraciality has been dissipating and delegitimizing African American voices and perspectives that openly speak about the despair of the black poor, the conflicts of the black middle class, or the reassertion of white supremacy. However, Norman rejects the very premises on which Warren bases his claim and which many use to express their hostility toward antiracist work and programs. In particular, Norman sees the terms "post-Jim Crow" and "post-Civil Rights" as especially vexing because they ignore the structural inequalities that continue to marginalize, appropriate, and exploit African American culture and experience. Initially, Norman's promotion of the neo-segregation narratives might seek to capitalize on the success of the neo-slave narrative. However, to Norman's credit, and ultimately to the book's, he knows what he's getting into and productively wrestles with the potentially troublesome terms (for example, "neo") that could sabotage his efforts in his introduction. In fact, throughout the first two chapters, Norman casts the neo-segregation narrative alongside the neo-slave narrative tradition and uses it to lay out the parameters for a definition of the neo-segregation narrative. Norman's first chapter uses Lorraine Hansberry's screenplay adaptation of her play A Raisin in the Sun as a brilliant starting point. Hansberry's unfilmed version of Raisin disrupts popular readings of the play as a universal family drama and produces a more explicitly critical viewing of integration than it appears in the play or the multiple film adaptations. In choosing Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Norman finds the perfect companion to Hansberry. The novel, like Norman's book, makes a compelling case against a mainstream narrative that promotes integration but retains its racial hierarchy, often to destructive effects on African Americans. Morrison's work is particularly useful because Beloved, like David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, is [End Page 415] part of the neo-slave narrative tradition that Norman engages. In fact, Norman makes a daring play for Chaneysville as a neo-segregation narrative. More importantly, his claim stands as the guiding edict for the book as a whole: "The novel does not pose segregation as just an extension of slavery, as is common in neo-slave narratives, but rather poses slavery as another form of the longstanding and intricate maintenance of the color line in the legal sphere. Jim Crow remains the pivotal point of reference for all eras" (60). To drive home his point, Norman focuses on Alice Walker's The Color Purple and an obsession with the white gaze. In highlighting the womanist politics in Purple, Norman produces a community that centers on "a decidedly minoritarian perspective" (55). Nevertheless, Norman smartly avoids wedding himself to any strict theoretical or political ideology. Chapter 3 reveals his eclectic collection of works by performing a virtual resurrection of Wesley Brown's Darktown Strutters, a novel that Norman claims uses black-face as a radically political act. The pairing of Brown's novel with Spike Lee's film Bamboozled makes blackface minstrelsy a dramatic point of reference that signals virtually no change in the representations of African Americans in the mainstream imagination. Norman willingly engages volatile terrain and challenges us to consider the complex meanings that sit behind the donning of the blackface mask and, by extension, Jim Crow. In...