Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison investigates the motif of dismemberment in Morrison's fiction from multiple perspectives—historical, psychological and cultural. My first chapter on A Mercy focusses on the aspect of historical dismemberment in the context of colonialism and slavery. I look at the forced separation of African Americans from their families and motherland in terms of originary experiences of racism and dismemberment. This entailed fragmentation for African Americans who struggled to develop strategies of survival in the New World. My second chapter on Jazz focuses on the impact of transgenerationally transmitted trauma. I argue that experiences of dismemberment – such as feelings of amputation and phantom limbs – arise not from physical amputation but from traumatic experiences and the unconscious of preceding generations as the result of trasgenerational hauntings. I borrow from the psychoanalytic insights of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in my explanation of phantom limbs in Jazz. The third section of my project looks at how social order is brought about in the fictive community of Sula through the scapegoating mechanism. I define the scapegoating principle in Sula in terms of cultural dismemberment because of the ways the community members symbolically cut a pariah figure, like Sula, off by performing symbolic acts of violence. The characterization of Sula emphasizes the psychological need for a scapegoat figure who can give an outlet to the defensive tendencies of the community following discrimination. My final chapter focusses on Morrison's most recent novel Home, which is about homecoming. In this novel, Morrison continues with her project of imagining a space of domestic and social comfort which is physically and psychically safe in the broad sense of a homeland for African Americans. Home offers a place of salvation from social, historical and psychic fragmentation or the traumas of racism which result in experiences of disruption, amputation and dismemberment.

My research arises from a critique of the tendency within terrorism debates to equate the terrorist act with the production of spectacular images. Chapter 1 uses the work of Luce Irigaray to critique this trend in terrorism discourses, arguing that such a characterisation relies on a repression of the very materiality that terrorist action exploits. Moreover, placing the concept of terror in an Irigarayan framework reveals that the concept of terrorism is bound up with concepts of masculinity. In developing this critical approach, I build on the thinking of both Irigaray and Gayatri Spivak in turning to literary representations of terrorism to find a means of articulating a new understanding of the concept of terrorism and its place within our culture. Chapter 2 brings together the figure of the woman terrorist in terrorism studies, Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter(1979), and Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist (1985) in order to critique the portrayal of the feminine in terrorism discourses. Chapter 3 then moves on to ask how the global reach of terrorism discourses after September 11th, 2001, has impacted on our understanding of masculinity and femininity, looking at the relationship between the body and subjectivity in Ian McEwan's Saturday (2006). Finally, Chapter 4 examines how Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) figures the body as a site of resistance to such global narratives of terror, as he explores the possibility of an embodied ethics opening up a suspension of photographic and filmic modes of perception. By setting up a dialogue between terrorism studies and literary fiction, I reintroduce the body to our conceptualisation of terrorism. In doing so, I show how literature can open up new ethical horizons in an otherwise closed rhetoric.