ENGL 5308 - U.S. Ethnic Literature Guide

The central protagonists in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved may be read as hysterics. These characters, who are haunted by the past, unconsciously express their repressed memories of psychic trauma through physical symptoms and employ a corporeal discourse to articulate what is otherwise unspeakable. The novel explores the ways in which the disempowered and dispossessed express personal dissatisfaction and enact political dissent. An analysis of the relationship between the repression of pain and the repossession of the past suggests that this novel, like hysteria, highlights the importance of confronting, reclaiming, and transforming history and indicates the healing potential of memories. However, in its examination of the politics of gender and race, the novel also challenges Freudian and French feminist theories of hysteria in significant ways.

This essay positions Octavia Butler's "Kindred" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved" within the slave narrative tradition, focusing specifically on issues of embodiment and authenticity. It argues that the fantastic elements in these novels demonstrate the limitations of realist representation and official discourse for capturing the subjective experience of slavery, while simultaneously revealing the importance of understanding such devices in relation to literatures of both the fantastic and the African-American canon. Both novels reveal the degree to which the consequences of slavery continue to disturb American culture, largely because this history has not been acknowledged and accepted. Through their emphasis on embodiment and the healing made possible by overcoming mind/body dualism, Butler and Morrison challenge the liberal-humanist model of subjectivity and argue for a model of self-in-connections consistent with the self expressed in nineteenth-century slave narratives

The writer examines how Toni Morrison's acclaimed historical novel Beloved enacts a hybrid vision of history and time that sheds new light on issues addressed by such theories of the postmodern as the fictionality of history, the blurring of past and present, and the questioning of grand historical metanarratives. She argues that while the novel exhibits a postmodern skepticism of sweeping historical narratives, of “Truth,” and of Marxist teleological notions of time as diachronic, it also retains an African-American and modernist political commitment to the vital importance of deep cultural memory. She submits that Morrison's mediations between postmodernism and African-American social protest enable her to draw the best from both theoretical camps and make us question the more extremist voices asserting that the postmodern world is bereft of history.

Presents an excerpt from the book "Troubling Worlds: The Transformation and Persistence of Violence in Contemporary Feminist Utopian Narratives."

Examines the structure of the novels "Beloved" and "Jazz," by Toni Morrison. Characteristics of Morrison's writing technique; Intertexuality between the two novels; How Morrison creates narrative designs that avoid immobilization; Overview of the novels.

The title character in Toni Morrison's Beloved embodies the history and memory of rape. In fact, her supernatural form is the shape-shifting witch, derived by African Americans from the succubus, a female rapist and nightmare figure of European myth. Beloved functions like a traumatic, repetitive nightmare: in addition to representing characters' repressed memories of rape, she attacks Sethe and Paul D. Morrison also uses the succubus figure to represent the effects of institutionalized rape during slavery. Beloved drains Sethe of vitality and Paul D of semen, and these violations represent dehumanization and commodified reproduction. Finally, by portraying a female rapist figure and a male rape victim, Morrison foregrounds race, rather than gender, as the crucial category determining the domination or rape of her African American characters.

Analyzes author Toni Morrison's book, "Beloved." Transformation of many prevalent critical notions of American modernism; Historical era of slavery; Presentation of the psychological and aesthetic difficulties of narrating the stories and histories of slave bodies in pain.