The larger issue of the relationship between theory, fiction and experience provides the backdrop for a study of constructions of home in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Feminist standpoint theory contends that knowledge is socially and historically constructed. Using the home as a category of analysis, I show how Morrison's constructions of home are located within specific socio-economic, racial, and political contexts which mold the novels' characters. Both feminist standpoint theory and the novels develop a notion of "positionality"--one's location within a larger social and historical network. Differences in focus do exist, however, which stem from their respective developmental and experiential contexts--one being primarily theoretical and scholarly, and the other being the complex literary and fictional mediation of a political experience. Unlike the theoretical articulation of concepts of the standpoint, fiction offers a complex perspective that may, in turn, be used to inform discussions of political and epistemological concepts.

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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.

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.

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-02-24Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:18:27Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 pinto_ma_me_sjrp.pdf: 746600 bytes, checksum: 0e3b007b8cfb91086d80f31f409204a7 (MD5) / Os conceitos de rememoração e renembrança são apresentados e definidos nos romances Beloved (1987), da autora norte-americana Toni Morrison, e Desmundo (1996), da autora brasileira Ana Miranda, respectivamente, como processos pertencentes ao fenômeno mnemônico, incorporados ao espaço ficcional para revisar perspectivas históricas nacionais oficiais. Ambos os romances foram elaborados a partir de fatos ocorridos em momentos históricos cruciais da grande narrativa de formação nacional dos Estados Unidos e do Brasil. Beloved resgata o crime cometido pela escrava foragida Margaret Garner, poucos anos antes da Guerra Civil (1861-1865), quando matou a própria filha na tentativa de evitar que suas crianças voltassem para a fazenda onde seriam escravizadas. Desmundo retoma a vivência de uma das órfãs enviadas pelo rei de Portugal à colônia Brasil, no século XVI, para servirem como esposas, a pedido dos padres que esperavam extinguir os hábitos dos colonos de se relacionarem com as índias. A confluência entre memória, história e literatura acontece nesses romances por meio da rememoração e da renembrança que se configuram, ao mesmo tempo, como processos mnemônicos realizados pelas personagens e como estruturas narrativas. A rememoração é definida como a imagem que permanece (individualmente e no mundo) quando algo deixa de existir; a renembrança é originada a partir de experiências singulares e possui relações com um mundo fantasioso. Ambas compartilham características ligadas ao enigma da representação que retoma eventos do passado, tais como a construção paradoxal de ausências e distâncias. Porém, a rememoração possibilita a memória coletiva, enquanto a renembrança ocasiona a memória individual. As estratégias narrativas de cada romance acompanham a caracterização de cada um desses processos, distinguindo-se na constituição da memória... / The concepts of rememory and renembrança are presented and defined in Toni Morrison‟s Beloved (1987) and Ana Miranda‟s Desmundo (1996), respectively, as mnemonic processes incorporated into the fictional space in order to revise official national historical perspectives. The American and the Brazilian novels were both based on facts that took place in crucial historical moments of the master narrative concerning the national formation of each country. Beloved revisits the crime committed by Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave, during the pre-Civil War years, when she killed her own daughter in an attempt to save her children from returning to slavery. Desmundo recollects the experiences of one of the Portuguese orphan girls sent to sixteenth-century colonial Brazil to serve as wives, by orders of the king and by the request of the priests who wanted to put an end to the sexual relations among Portuguese colonialists and natives. Rememory and Renembrança set the interrelations between memory, history and literature because they are the mnemonic processes engendered by the characters and, at the same time, they form the structure of the novels. Rememory is defined as the image that lasts (individually and in the world) when something no longer exists; renembrança originates from singular experiences and establishes relations with a fantasy world. The two processes share features related to the enigma of representation that recaptures past events, such as paradoxical constructions of absences and distances. However, rememory triggers collective memory whereas renembrança belongs to individual memory. The narrative strategies of each novel follow the characteristics of each process, distinguishing themselves in the creation of characters‟ memory and experiences. These differences, though, converge to a common objective of preventing the erasure of the past not only through... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

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)

Literary scholars have been examining and recreating the experiences of “bonded” female characters within Toni Morrison’s novels for decades. However, the distinct experiences of these enslaved women, that are also mothers have not been astutely examined by scholars and deserves more attention. My thesis fleshes out the characterization of several of Morrison’s bonded-mothers and identifies them as a part of a developing controlling image and theory, called the bondmother. Situating these characters within this category allows readers to trace their journeys towards freedom and personal redemption. This character tracing will occur by examining the following Toni Morrison novels: Beloved (1987) and Paradise (1997). In order to fully examine the experiences of these characters it will be necessary for me to expand the definition of bondage and mother. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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)

This thesis argues that a prominent concern among contemporary writers of fiction is the recuperation of lost or occluded histories. Increasingly, contemporary writers, especially postcolonial writers, are using the medium of fiction to explore those areas of political and cultural history that have been written over or unwritten by the dominant narrative of “official” History. The act of excavating these past histories is simultaneously both traumatic and liberating – which is not to suggest that liberation itself is without pain and trauma. The retelling of traumatic pasts can lead, as is portrayed in The God of Small Things (1997), to further trauma and pain. Postcolonial writers (and much of the world today can be construed as postcolonial in one way or another) are seeking to bring to the fore stories of the past which break down the rigid binaries upon which colonialism built its various empires, literal and ideological. Such writing has in a sense been enabled by the collapse, in postcolonial and postmodernist discourse, of the Grand Narrative of History, and its fragmentation into a plurality of competing discourses and histories. The associated collapse of the boundary between history and fiction is recognized in the useful generic marker “historiographic metafiction,” coined by Linda Hutcheon. The texts examined in this study are all variants of this emerging contemporary genre. What they also have in common is a concern with the consequences of exile or diaspora. This study thus explores some of the representations of how the exilic experience impinges on the development of identity in the postcolonial world. The identities of “displaced” people must undergo constant change in order to adjust to the new spaces into which they move, both literal and metaphorical, and yet critical to this adjustment is the cultural continuity provided by psychologically satisfying stories about the past. The study shows that what the chosen texts share at bottom is their mutual need to retell the lost pasts of their characters, the trauma that such retelling evokes and the new histories to which they give birth. These texts generate new histories which subvert, enrich, and pre-empt formal closure for the narratives of history which determine the identities of nations.