1 - Toni Morrison

Question 1

Main characteristics

Answer 1

a text which is not only a historical document.
Many of her text are filled with magic and episodes that are not plausible. She enjoys mixing thing ++ real and things that cannot happen.
⇒ Unrealistic linked with Folklore..
She looks for DISORIENTATION : if you read 1st chapters ⇒ reflects the situation of slaves.. suggest that this xp of disorientation is crucial.

Question 2

Toni Morrison date

Answer 2

1931-2019

Question 3

1931

Answer 3

a date that appears ++ at the beginning. Sth which is also meaningful and allows T. Morrison to survey a long period of time of 30s with great depression.. As the character grow and time passes ⇒ different perspective is seen.

Question 4

A late career as a writer

Question 5

to whom she had dedicated her book ?

Answer 5

Her father = car washer, construction worker. She owes a lot to him.

She was born in context of Great depression. ++ importance of the father : she has dedicated the novel to her father. “Daddy” it precedes a dedication “The fathers may soar And the children may know their names” ⇒ 2 ref to daddy.
Her father died when she wrote

Question 6

How the death of her father did impact her ?

Answer 6

⇒ Write from a male perspective.
⇒ Journey of someone who realizes total ignorance before taking a journey through its roots in his ancestors in the south in order to meet his ancestors.

Dans ce livre ++ de pères qui sont absents etc et qui laissent un héritage à redécouvrir à leur progéniture.

Question 7

Graduated ?

Answer 7

Graduated in 1953 from Howard University in Washington D.C. and received an M.A from Cornell University after she submitted a thesis on the theme of suicide in the fictions of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

Question 8

Before writing she already had a critical view on the act of writing why ?

Answer 8

Teacher at Texas Southern University then back to Howard University, Princeton…

1867-1984: She became a fiction editor in New York so that she was able to promote other African-American writers.

Question 9

When did she started to write ?

Answer 9

Only when she was 40 that she turned to writing, animated by a desire to fashion a new social place for African-Americans in the cultural sphere. of a new generation of women
→ She knew she had something new to bring, a new vision.

Question 10

An embodiment of the spirit of the 70s

Answer 10

• Black studies program
• Fighting for a historical narrative that was not represented by mainstream American discourse (African-American heroes, thinkers and philosophers had been ignored. )
• Defending the memory of Black experience encompassing oral tradition/popular folktales/people’s collective memory, elements which were long marginalized.
• Playing with subverted myths that are ++ classics and subverting them in an African American dimension = what she does.
• Fighting to represent the diversity and vitality of Black cultural production + lack of a female literary figure.

Question 11

Black Studies Program

Answer 11

1968-69: creation of a Black Studies Program at Berkeley (after student protests and teachers’ activism) in a desire to bring to academia the fight for equal representation .

Question 12

Avis sur historiens, Morrison

Answer 12

Morrison: travail des historiens a autant de valeurs que petits artefacts qu’elle va glaner dans familles qu’elle interview = disent de l’histoire mais ont été marginalisé ⇒ elle veut faire rentrer dans grande histoire la petite histoire, histoire ancrée dans le folklore, histoire familiale etc.

Question 13

Revisiting the American Past

Answer 13

1970s: bicentennial of the American revolution led to a revisiting of American past.
200 years after American declaration of independence : moment to reconsider what it means be american / african american…
100 years after civil war : the civil war which took place 1861-1865 with the abolition of slavery but it didn’t mean equal right of citizens because there was segregation

Question 14

Main idea of revisiting the American Past ?

Answer 14

⇒ Reconsider American history and American Letters and to replace afro-american writers in this literary canon.

Question 15

The Black Book

Answer 15

(1974), an anthology about Black life in the U.S, mixing pictures, primary documents, articles, music, artwork, advertisements.

Conducting research for this anthology gave her material for her future novels: East African tale of the flying Africans (Song of Solomon)

She is proud of the black book because = the work of someone researching material to expose the material of other’s community

Question 16

Quote T Morrison about black book

Answer 16

“ I still think there is no other work that tells and visualizes a story of such misery with seriousness, humor, grace and triumph.”—Toni Morrison

Question 17

What is in the Black Book ?

Answer 17

*Transcripts from fugitive slaves’ trials
*Nineteenth-century slave auction notices
*Antebellum reward posters
*Sheet music for work songs and freedom chants
*Images of cross burnings and lynching
*Patents registered by Black inventors
*Posters from “Black Hollywood” films of the 1930s and 1940s…
⇒ Elements that belong to everyday life.

Question 18

Song of Solomon’s reception and impact on Morrison’s career

Answer 18

Song of Solomon : crucial point in her personal life since the reception of this book encouraged Morrison to choose writing as a career and become a professional author.

The novel obtained the National Book Critics Circle Award and also met popular acclaim as it was published in the Book of the Month Club promoted by Oprah Winfrey

Question 19

An icon of the 80s and 90s

Answer 19

She became + famous with Beloved and Song of Solomon.
“Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison”, January 24, 1988, Letter in the New York Times speak of her work as a “a monument of vision and discovery and trust”, a “gift to our community, our country, our conscience, our courage flourishing as it grows, we here record our pride, our respect and our appreciation for the treasury of your findings and invention.”

Question 20

Reward of Beloved & Toni Morrison

Answer 20

⇒ Beloved obtained the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Fiction in 1993.

Question 21

Toni Morrison, a writer and an essayist

Answer 21

→ Her novels address the ambivalent position of African-Americans in the US from oppression and violence to the belief in emancipation.
→ Morrison has always been vocal and has extensively written non-fiction, most importantly on the positioning of Black writers.

Question 22

What does she think about literature for literature’s sake ?

Answer 22

She rejects literature for literature’s sake in favour of more directly political prose and poetry, breaking with ideas of craft and style, cutting off from the traditional literary canon.
⇒ She writes because she has some political ambition. She wants to revisit history. BUT She writes a work of fiction, she is not teaching history in her novels.

Question 23

Quote Toni Morrison about fiction

Answer 23

“Fiction has never been entertainment for me. It has been the work I have done for most of my adult life. I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold, and digest information is via narrative”. Nobel Prize Lecture, 1993.

Question 24

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

Answer 24

⇒ Un de ses essais les + célèbres
⇒ racial perspective : metaphor to suggest that most african-american writers have been able to play in the dark while others. She wishes to challenge the very notion of knowledge.

⇒ You cannot consider afro-american fiction was born when afro-american starte writing : presence of afro-american had an impact on the fiction. It would be a lie to consider that American fiction has never been impacted by the presence of Afro-American. They were still here : a looming presence.

Question 25

So, In Playing in the Dark (1992)

Answer 25

• She suggests that White America is largely established on a fear of Black America.
• One of the first non-white, non-male authors to challenge the hegemony of a predominantly white and male-centered literary world.
• She defends the idea that American literature as a whole has unconsciously been shaped by the presence of Black slaves, by an imagination/rhetoric born out blackness and what she calls an “Africanist” presence.
• Giving Black Americans a place in a canon that had largely excluded them. She has not moved to the center of the canon but managed to move the center.
• Proud of being a mainstream writer at the end of her life : “I stood at the border, at the edge, and claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”

Question 26

Toni Morrison : a “Black writer”?

Answer 26

“in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old colored girl from Lorain, Ohio. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.”

⇒ Pour autant elle lit Tolstoï : elle montre une dimension universelle dans son écriture : certes elle écrit d’abord pour sa communauté mais chacun peut s’y retrouver, son histoire résonne parce que mécanisme de pouvoir etc.. She advocates for a liberation of standards.

Question 27

Looking for an idiom

Answer 27

Morrison is concerned with questions of language, rhetoric and the rhythm of her prose → search for an idiom, an aesthetic that would be specific to Black Americans with distinctive tropes.

Question 28

Orality

Answer 28

Drawing a lot on orality : “There are things that I try to incorporate into my fiction that are directly and deliberately related to what I regard as the major characteristics of Black art, wherever it is. One of which is the ability to be both print and oral literature: to combine those two aspects so that the text can be read in silence, of course, but one should be able to hear them as well.

An Interview with Toni Morrison by Nellie McKay Source (1983)
“What you hear is what you remember. That oral quality is deliberate. It is not unique to my writing, but it is a deliberate sound that I try to catch.

Question 29

Sources : facts or fiction ?

Answer 29

“Instead of inventing myths, which is a certain body of work which black writers are in fact engaged in, I just didn’t do that, I was just interested in finding what myths already existed.”

Question 30

Drawing on her own experience

Answer 30

“I fell in love with myself. I reclaimed myself and the world – a real revelation. I named it. I listed it. I identified it. I recreated it”.

Drawing her experience from motherhood. Toni Morrison was a mother of two boys and she says it helped her in picturing Milkman as a protagonist : « I was able to enter a male view of the world, which, to me, means a delight in dominion – a definite need to exercise dominion over place and people ».

Question 31

Feminist writer ?

Answer 31

Morrison is challenging the label of “feminist” which she sees as confining. She refuses to associate oral story-telling to a women’s tradition and adds that story-telling was “a shared activity between the men and the women in my family”. (interview with Nellie McKay,1983)

Question 32

“…The best art is political…” quote

Answer 32

In “Rootedness: the Ancestor as Foundation”, she writes: “It seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time”.

So, her political ambition is to rehabilitate and offer alternative ways of acquiring knowledge, of experiencing the world, ways that have long been discredited and marginalized.

Question 33

What does she think about realism ?

Answer 33

She doesn’t want to be realist “that’s not my style”

Question 34

What is her style ?

Answer 34

Her style is AURAL = visual has sound = congregation

Sometimes associated to a literary trend called magic realism because of the dream-like dimension of her texts. Often supernatural and unrealistic things happen.

“My own use of enchantment simply comes because that’s the way the world was for me and for the black people I knew.…”

Question 35

Trying to give hues to words in song of solomon : exemple : black

Answer 35

You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty.

Question 36

Sources : facts or fiction ?

Answer 36

“Instead of inventing myths, which is a certain body of work which black writers are in fact engaged in, I just didn’t do that, I was just interested in finding what myths already existed.”

“I’d always heard that black people could fly before they came to this country, and the spirituals and gospels are full of flying, and I decided not to treat them as some Western form of escape, and something more positive than escape.

Question 37

Drawing on her own experience

Answer 37

Drawing her experience from motherhood. Toni Morrison was a mother of two boys and she says it helped her in picturing Milkman as a protagonist : « I was able to enter a male view of the world, which, to me, means a delight in dominion – a definite need to exercise dominion over place and people ».

Question 38

Postmodernity def

Answer 38

Challenges a goal-oriented history.
Questions the representation of history and cultural identities.
Problematizes the notions of time and history

⇒ L’histoire n’a pas vocation à nous sauver. On ne va pas que vers le progrès, on régresse aussi et l’histoire peut être revisitée, revue de manière kaléidoscopique.

⇒ mixing history with stories : story are here to illuminate what we know about history. Sometimes fiction teaches you sth.

Question 39

Postmodernity def

Answer 39

Challenges a goal-oriented history.
Questions the representation of history and cultural identities.
Problematizes the notions of time and history

⇒ L’histoire n’a pas vocation à nous sauver. On ne va pas que vers le progrès, on régresse aussi et l’histoire peut être revisitée, revue de manière kaléidoscopique.

⇒ mixing history with stories : story are here to illuminate what we know about history. Sometimes fiction teaches you sth.

Question 40

”. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, London, Routledge, 1996.
about post modern work

Answer 40

“The typical postmodern work of art is arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentered, fluid, discontinuous, pastiche-like”.
An Introduction, London, Routledge, 1996.
about post modern work

Question 41

About postmodernist fiction Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987.

Answer 41

“Postmodernist fiction does hold the mirror up to reality; but that reality, now more than ever before, is plural.” Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987.

Question 42

Reality is plural in Song of Solomon

Answer 42

⇒ Evts au chap 1 sont revisités et on comprend plus tard pourquoi il saute du temps : circularité qui fait que parfois compliqué à suivre mais nous oblige aussi nous même à revisiter éléments que l’on lit pour avoir un éclairage différent.

Question 43

Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 1989.

Answer 43

“I suppose the very word “representation” unavoidably suggests a given which the act of representing duplicates in some way. This is normally considered the realm of mimesis. Yet, by simply making representation into an issue again postmodernism challenges our mimetic assumptions about representation, (…) assumptions about its transparency and common-sense naturalness.”

⇒ Réalité change avec premiers outils de communication : télé etc donc questionnements sur la réalité

Question 44

A postmodern writer

Answer 44

Self oriented type of fiction, Self & relation with the environment
Disruption of time, of face, nothing is unilateral

Don’t take anything for granted : you jst have to expect stories, fiction, sometimes supernatural episodes (like Pilote naval she doesn’t have a naval) but all these elements are ++ symbolical and help you frame a particular representation of history.

Question 45

Postmodern questioning

Answer 45

Which world is this?
What is to be done in it?
Which of my selves is to do it?
What is a world?
What kinds of worlds are there?
Doesn’t my narrative have just as much right to truth as yours?

⇒ on réfléchit à qui on est dans l’environnement par rapport aux autres.
⇒ ici mon récit a autant de valeur que le tien même s’il a pu être mis de côté, chacun peut faire valoir sa propre histoire = ++ post-moderne

Question 46

Post modernité ♥ low culture

Answer 46

Post modernité ♥ low culture : they draw inspiration on insignificant things, quite anecdotal : black books collected things from anecdotes.

Same in language : ++ oral & very difficult to understand & description ++ lyrical. Mixture of popular & high-standing

Question 47

Challenging Master Narratives
The Bluest Eye (1970)

Answer 47

“The Master Narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else: The Master Fiction. History. It has a certain point of view.

→ the little black girl who wished she can have a white doll : she is excluded from that. She is trying to change this perspective & offering alternative way to celebrate beauty, loveliness. The more prised gift = ideology speaking : high standards in American context

Don’t take anything for granted and if shocked about sth try to understand why and don’t impose anything on it.
The American Dream = récit puissant. Progress etc = narratives that are not always relevant when you come to understand the historical truth

Question 48

Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition : A Report on Knowledge

Answer 48

“Modernity coined the expressions “Grand narratives”, “metanarratives” or “master narrative” to designate transhistorical narratives that are deeply embedded in a particular culture. Lyotard: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

The master narrative legitimated knowledge and tried to make sense of history and create a universally accepted narrative. (Ex: the American Dream/science/progress and emancipation/religion…)

Question 49

A historical novel ?

Answer 49

“Song of Solomon is not a historical fiction but, rather, a blending of myth, folklore, symbolism, realism, and the history of slavery in a novel intensively focused on questions of identity: what kind of identity does Milkman have without a proper name?

“The capaciousness of Morrison’ s narrative resides in its capacity to unearth connections between Western mythologies and African folkloric traditions, and between the specificities of regional or national social circumstances and the deeper historical strains to be traced across time and location.”