Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics: An Ethical PoeticsToni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience. In foregrounding the ethics of fiction writing, the book resists any triumphalist reading of Morrison's achievement in order to allow the meditative, unsettled, and unsettling questions that arise throughout her long labor at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself.Moving between close reading and critical theory, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics reveals the ways in which Morrison's primary engagement with language has been a search for how and what language is made to communicate, and for how and what speaks in and from generation to generation. There is no easy escape fromsuch legacy, no escape into a pure language free of the burdens of racialized agendas. Rather, there is the example of Morrison's commitment to writerly, which is to say readerly, wakefulness.At a time when sustained study devoted to single authors has become rare, this book will be an invaluable resource for readers, scholars, and teachers of Morrison's work. |
Contents
On Speaking | 28 |
LaW and Sacrifice | 76 |
The Temporal Logic ofMorrisons | 120 |
Old Languages | 158 |
The Poetics | 188 |
Epilogue | 216 |
Notes | 253 |
| 285 | |
| 301 | |
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African American African American literature apocalypticism Baby Suggs become Beloved Bluest Eye body calls claim Claudia colonial Convent D’Ortega dead death defined Derek Walcott diflflerent discourse dolls Douglass dream eflflect epigraph escape father fiction figure find fire first Florens Florens’s gesture girl haunting Ibid imagine jezebel language literature living Margaret Garner master memory Mercy metaphor Morrison’s Morrison’s fiction mother narrative narrator novel ofher ofhis ofits oflanguage oflfler ofthe one’s Oven Paradise past Paul Pecola plantation political present question race racial reader Rebekka reflect relation reveals Ruby Ruby’s sacrifice sense Sethe Sethe’s silence simile slave slave narrative slavery slavery’s Song ofSolomon space speak specific Steward story Sula Sweet Home takes Tar Baby tion Toni Morrison town town’s trans translatio imperii University Press Vaark vanishing violence witness woman women writing York Zechariah