Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison

ISBN-13: 9781572338586 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 173 str.

Melanie Anderson

Opis

At first glance, Beloved would appear to be the only ghost story among Toni Morrison snine novels, but as this provocative new study shows, spectral presences and places aboundin the celebrated author s fiction. Melanie R. Anderson explores how Morrison uses spectersto bring the traumas of African American life to the forefront, highlighting histories andexperiences, both cultural and personal, that society at large too frequently ignores.
Working against the background of magical realism, while simultaneously expandingnotions of the supernatural within American and African American writing, Morrisonpeoples her novels with what Anderson identifies as two distinctive types of ghosts: spectralfigures and social ghosts. Deconstructing Western binaries, Morrison uses the spectral toindicate power through its transcendence of corporality, temporality, and explication, and sheemploys the ghostly as a metaphor of erasure for living characters who are marginalized andhaunt the edges of their communities. The interaction of these social ghosts with the spectralpresences functions as a transformative healing process that draws the marginalized figureout of the shadows and creates links across ruptures between generations and between pastand present, life and death. This book examines how these relationships become increasinglymore 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 fictionwriters, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison demonstrates how the Nobel laureate spowerful 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 narratetheir stories.
Melanie R. Anderson is an Instructional Assistant Professor of American Literature at theUniversity of Mississippi."