In this essay, the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison is observed using a working psychoanalytical approach. Story is observed as an important factor in engaging the reader on a personal level with the experience of trauma. By surveying Morrison’s use of imagery and language, this essay will examine how Morrison employs literary methods that imitate the psychological processes regarding how trauma is communicated to the waking state from the unconscious. The resulting testimony of the novel that arises as the result of these processes is also observed. This essay concludes that Morrison’s use of these literary methods functions to obligate the reader to involve themselves in the process of trauma and its resolution.

This thesis aims to explore and evaluate the traumatic space of Denver in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Currently, a lack of critical discourse exists to link together Denver, trauma, and theories of spatiality. This thesis evaluates three types of trauma that inform and develop Denver's traumatic space: direct, indirect, and insidious trauma. Paired with spatial theories, the origins of Denver's trauma are mapped throughout the various places of the novel. The result of this analysis reveals a complex and layered traumatic space, with lasting ramifications on Denver's sense of safety, identity, and stability in a post-slavery United States.

Toni Morrison reinterprets and reconstitutes American history by placing the lives, stories and experiences of African Americans in a position of centrality, while relegating white American history and cultural traditions to the margins of her narratives. She rewrites American history from an alternative - African American woman's - perspective, and subverts the accepted racist and patriarchally inspired `truths' about life, love and women's experiences through her sympathetic depiction of murderous mother love and complex female relationships in Beloved. She writes about oppression, pain and suffering, and of the need for the acknowledgement and alleviation of the various forms of oppression that scar human existence. Morrison's engagement with healing in Beloved forms the central focus of this short dissertation. The novel is analysed in relation to Mary Douglas's `Two Bodies' theory, John Caputo's ideas on progressive Foucaultian hermeneutics and healing gestures, and Julia Martin's thoughts on alternative healing practices based on non-dualism and interconnectedness. Within this interdisciplinary context, Beloved is read as a `small start' to `creative engagement' with alternative healing practices (Martin, 1996:104). / English / M.A. (English)

Toni Morrison reinterprets and reconstitutes American history by placing the lives, stories and experiences of African Americans in a position of centrality, while relegating white American history and cultural traditions to the margins of her narratives. She rewrites American history from an alternative - African American woman's - perspective, and subverts the accepted racist and patriarchally inspired `truths' about life, love and women's experiences through her sympathetic depiction of murderous mother love and complex female relationships in Beloved. She writes about oppression, pain and suffering, and of the need for the acknowledgement and alleviation of the various forms of oppression that scar human existence. Morrison's engagement with healing in Beloved forms the central focus of this short dissertation. The novel is analysed in relation to Mary Douglas's `Two Bodies' theory, John Caputo's ideas on progressive Foucaultian hermeneutics and healing gestures, and Julia Martin's thoughts on alternative healing practices based on non-dualism and interconnectedness. Within this interdisciplinary context, Beloved is read as a `small start' to `creative engagement' with alternative healing practices (Martin, 1996:104). / English / M.A. (English)

Toni Morrison chose to revisit the neo-slave narrative genre twenty-five years after the publication of Beloved with A Mercy in 2008. With these two texts, Morrison offers her readers one story that shows the descent into slavery and one that shows progression towards freedom. The purpose of this thesis is to place Morrison’s two neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy, next to one another in order to better understand the journey to freedom through self-love. This work examines the concept of self-love and the necessary components—maternal nurturance, ancestral connection, and communal interaction—that must come together to help Morrison’s characters learn to love and see themselves as their “own best thing.” The repercussions that self-love’s absence has for both individual characters and their larger communities is also discussed and illustrated by the struggles of Florens in A Mercy and Sethe in Beloved.

The text of Beloved will be analyzed with a Kleinian and Freudian approach in order to show how the characters see each other as good or bad objects. This essay begins with an explanation of terms and a short presentation of psychoanalysis and object relations theory. Thereafter, each main character and their relation to Beloved will be examined and discussed as well as their relation to each other.

This study examines the image of house and home as the reification of our domains as living, dwelling, housed beings in three novels: Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits; Anne-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees; and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Being human, we form through perception, build through forming, dwell in building, and perceive through dwelling. Through close reading and analysis, this thesis examines questions of: If we are how we dwell, then what happens when the structures and the spaces of our dwellings become haunted? What happens when "home" becomes a facade that suspends necessary elements of dwelling? This study projects that if we are how we dwell, the very nature of our being entails a constant questioning of what it is we allow a presence to in our how we form, build, dwell, and perceive within both tangible and intangible realms and the influential perspicacity literature bears within this process.

Submitted by Erika Demachki (erikademachki@gmail.com) on 2017-04-25T19:56:24Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Liliane de Paula Munhoz - 2017.pdf: 1821411 bytes, checksum: 642db2f2c2dd0325a6850e2f3fe6dfcc (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2017-04-26T12:43:33Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Liliane de Paula Munhoz - 2017.pdf: 1821411 bytes, checksum: 642db2f2c2dd0325a6850e2f3fe6dfcc (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-04-26T12:43:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Tese - Liliane de Paula Munhoz - 2017.pdf: 1821411 bytes, checksum: 642db2f2c2dd0325a6850e2f3fe6dfcc (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-22 / The purpose of this research is to present a critical reading of the novels Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, by the North-American author Toni Morrison, to show the form through which, in this trilogy, the representation of the sufferings of the Afro-American people and the history of their endurance move between Historiographical Metafiction and the Fantastic Realism. In these novels, the female voice focuses attention on the experience of women who lived (and under a certain point of view still live) in the shadow of past slavery. Between racism and sexism, the protagonists of the novels are, to use an expression from Morrison’s last novel of the trilogy, “Black Eves”, in an unusual but paradoxically mundane context. The period covered by the stories in these books is that of the Post-Emancipation of the slaves in the 1870s, and the social movements for black people’s civil rights, in the 1920s and in the 1970s, respectively, when the United States of America lived the Reconstruction Era, the great migrations of former slaves from the South to the North, the conquest of the Civil Rights, and the second wave of feminism. In all these periods, although free, the African-American people continued living under big and real social, economic and civil rights inequalities. The theoretical assumptions, which are the framework of this study, are the theory on the post-modern novel by Linda Hutcheon; the notion of truth as a linguistic construct, by Hayden White; the fantastic realism, by Tzvetan Todorov, Irène Bessière, David Roas and Pampa Arán; the theory of irony, according to Linda Hutcheon; and, on what concerns feminism, we refer to the studies of bell hooks (2015) and Deborah Gray White (1999). / Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo uma leitura crítica dos romances Amada, Jazz e Paraíso, da autora norte-americana Toni Morrison, para mostrar a forma como nesta trilogia a representação da realidade absurda do sofrimento do povo negro norte-americano e a história de sua resistência transitam entre a metaficção historiográfica e o realismo fantástico. Nesses romances, a voz feminina centra atenção nas experiências de mulheres que viveram (e de certa forma ainda vivem) à sombra de um passado de escravidão. Entre o racismo e o sexismo, as protagonistas dos romances são, para se usar uma expressão do último romance da trilogia, “Evas negras”, em contextos paradoxal-mente insólitos e banais. O recorte temporal é o Pós-Emancipação dos escravos nos anos de 1870 e os movimentos sociais pelos direitos dos negros, em 1920 e em 1970, quando os Estados Unidos da América viviam, respectivamente, a Recons-trução, as grandes migrações dos ex-escravos do Sul para o Norte, a conquista de Direitos Civis e a segunda onda do feminismo. Em todos esses períodos, mesmo livres, os afro-americanos continuaram vivendo grandes desigualdades sociais, econômicas e de direitos civis reais. Os pressupostos teóricos que fundamentam nossa análise consistem nos estudos sobre o romance pós-moderno de Linda Hutcheon; a noção de verdade como cons-truto linguístico de Hayden White; o realismo fantástico de Tzvetan Todorov, Irène Bessière, David Roas e Pampa Arán; a teoria da ironia, segundo Linda Hutcheon; e sobre o feminismo nos reportamos às reflexões de bell hooks (2015) e Deborah Gray White (1999).

This paper utilizes poststructuralist theory to investigate the polysemic nature of the eponymous character Beloved in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. The ghostly, anachronistic presence of Beloved renders the text open to multiple interpretations and this essay sets out to explore the ways in which meaning is created and communicated. From a poststructuralist perspective, considering that the meaning is in a state of flux, a text weaves its system of meaning around an assumed center in order to provide so-called stability. Peripheral meanings are repressed by the center to secure the meaning system. However, the periphery, which has a constructive function in the organization of the text, also has the deconstructive potential. Hence, the deconstructive dynamics are already inherent in the text. In Beloved, Toni Morrison addresses, among other things, the act of speaking the unspeakable and the process of constructing a new subjectivity out of the ghost of the past. Her text deconstructs the dominant narratives that have marginalized the black motherhood experience, explores the horrors of slavery through horror elements, and eventually exposes the inadequacy of language to depict such horrors. While the textual periphery is enabled to speak louder than the center, the textual subconscious flows freely. The reader is forced to participate actively in meaning-making in order to make sense of the fragmented narrative imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Beloved, as the abject other, defies the phallogocentric symbolic order. A counter-discourse emerges from the maternal, semiotic chora and empowers the otherized heroine Sethe to construct her subjectivity. Delving into the interrelationship between traumatic memory and the act of creating one’s own narrative, the text finds reparative elements in ancestral connection and thereby blends the psychological with the historical and the micro-level with the macro-level of meaning. This paper employs deconstructive key concepts from Jacques Derrida, psychoanalytic key concepts from Julia Kristeva, and seeks to unravel the dynamics in Morrison’s text that enable Beloved to be read polysemically.

In my dissertation I examine the steps in and performance of revolution through the writings of three Postmodern authors, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow, in light of the model of the biblical Exodus journey and the revolution which precipitated that movement. I suggest that the revolution which began with the Israelites' bondage in Egypt has provided the foundation for American literature. I show that Invisible Man, Beloved, and Ragtime not only employ the motif of the Exodus journey; they also perpetuate the silent revolution begun by the Israelites while held captive in Egypt. This dissertation consists of six chapters. Chapter One provides the introduction to the project. Chapter Two provides the model for this study by defining the characteristics of the Exodus journey, Moses as the leader of the Israelites, and the pattern of revolution established by Michael Walzer in Exodus and Revolution. In Chapters Three, Four, and Five, I apply the model established in Chapter Two to the individual texts. In Chapter Six, I draw three conclusions which arise from my study. My first conclusion is that the master story of the Exodus journey and the Israelites' liberation from Egypt informs all Western literaturewhether the literature reinforces the centrality of the master story to our lives or whether the literature refutes the significance of the master story. Second, the stages of revolution present in the biblical Exodus are also present in twentieth-century American literature. My third conclusion is that authors whose works deal with an exploration of the past in order to effect healing are authors who are revolutionary because their goal is to encourage revolution by motivating readers to refuse to accept the status quo and to, instead, join the revolution which demands change. They do this by asking questions which are characteristic of that which is postmodernnot so much looking for answers as demonstrating that questioning what is, is appropriate and necessary.