A traditional yet fresh approach to grasping the power of
Morrison's writing
With essays by Yvonne Atkinson, Marc C. Conner, Susan Corey,
Maria DiBattista, Barbara Johnson, Cheryl Lester, Katherine Stern,
and Michael Wood
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively
been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and
gender politics. This gathering of eight essays by top scholars
probes Morrison's novels and her growing body of nonfiction and
critical work for the complex and potent aesthetic elements that
have made her a major American novelist of the twentieth
century.
Through traditional aesthetic concepts such as the sublime, the
beautiful, and the grotesque, through issues of form, narrative,
and language, and through questions of affect and reader response,
the nine essays in this volume bring into relief the dynamic and
often overlooked range within Morrison's writing. Employing
aesthetic ideas that range from the ancient Greeks to contemporary
research in the black English oral tradition, "The Aesthetics of
Toni Morrison" shows the potency of these ideas for interpreting
Morrison's writing. This is a force Morrison herself has often
suggested in her claims that Greek tragedy bears a striking
similarity to "Afro-American communal structures."
At the same time each essay attends to the ways in which
Morrison also challenges traditional aesthetic concepts,
establishing the African American and female voices that are
essential to her sensibility. The result is a series of readings
that simultaneously expands our understanding of Morrison's work
and also provokes new thinking about an aesthetic tradition that is
nearly 2,500 years old.
These essays offer a rich complement to the dominant approaches
in Morrison scholarship by revealing aspects of her work that
purely ideological approaches have obscured or about which they
have remained oddly silent. Each essay focuses particularly on the
relations between the aesthetic and the ethical in Morrison's
writing and between the artistic production and its role in the
world at large. These relations show the rich political
implications that aesthetic analysis engenders.
By treating both Morrison's fiction and her nonfiction, the
essays reveal a mind and imagination that have long been intimately
engaged with the questions and traditions of the aesthetic domain.
The result is a provocative and original contribution to Morrison
scholarship, and to scholarship in American letters generally.
Marc C. Conner is an assistant professor of English at
Washington and Lee University. He has published articles in
"Studies in American Fiction" and "Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction."
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