Toni Morrison’s later novels Love and Home bring forth an issue of identity anxiety for those involved in the narrative: author, narrators, and readers. Featuring both first-person and third-person narrators, these works offer conflicting narratives in which the writer, Morrison, allows her characters to question her own authorial voice. Greater agency is given to the first-person narrators through which they deconstruct the traditional objectivity of third-person narratives. As such, this thesis argues, the structures of Love and Home extend their inside conversations to the real world of readers who must reconsider where their narrative trust has been. Moreover, Morrison’s challenge to her authorial voice becomes the means through which she questions the hegemony of U.S. historical narratives. In the end, it is the subjective voices of the first-person narrators which offer a more reliable, counter narrative of not only Morrison’s fictional stories, but that of the nation’s historical past. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This dissertation comprises a literary investigation of the way in which Toni Morrison is able to transcend stereotypes associated with African American masculinity within a selection of her works namely, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Paradise. I apply Carl Jung’s transcendent concept of the paradoxical Self as a lens through which to analyse Morrison’s different representations, illustrating how this concept affects the formation of identity and an understanding of masculinity. I also make use of Frantz Fanon, who suggests that Jung’s concept of the Self is a way in which black men are able to understand their experience of the world, in that such an experience is paradoxical in nature. It is this paradoxical experience of the world that I argue Morrison highlights in her male characters. In examining Morrison’s representations of masculinity, I also illustrate the intersection of race and gender and how this intersection affects identity creation, given the unique position that African American men occupy within American society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

Thesis (MA) -- Stellenbosch University, 2003. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The following thesis aims to place black, female experience at the centre of an analysis of four main texts. These texts are Yvonne Vera's Nehanda and Without a Name as well as Toni Morrison' s Song of Solomon and Beloved. By comparing and analysing these four novels, also utilising selected works from various theorists such as bell hooks and Chandra Mohanty, "mainstream" feminist theory is interrogated. Different political and social contexts are examined from the perspectives of writers and theorists that have conventionally been relegated to the margins of literary theory. The experiences of black people all over the world are marginalised and this thesis attempts to examine these texts without assuming that the experiences of the characters are "different" or "other". The first chapter focuses mainly on Morrison' s Song of Solomon but used Vera's Nehanda to comment on some spiritual similarities between an African female character and an African American female character. Chapter two focuses more strongly on African, specifically Zimbabwean, female experience during the second war of independence (or Chimurenga) in Zimbabwe. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Solomon, maar maak gebruik van Vera se Nehanda om Die tesis analiseer vier hooftekste vanuit die perspektief van swart, vroulike ervaring. Die tekste is Yvonne Vera se Nehanda en. Without a Name, sowel as Toni Morrison se Song of Solomon en Beloved. Hierdie vier romans word vergelyk. en ook, met die hulp van geselekteerde werke van verskeie teoretici soos bell hooks en Chandra Mohanty, geanaliseer in 'n poging om "hoofstroom" feministiese teorie krities te benader. Verskillende sosiaal-politiese kontekste word ondersoek, spesifiek vanuit die perspektiewe van skrywers en teoretici wat konvensioneel gesproke gereduseer is tot die marges van literere teorie. Teen die agtergrond van die gemarginaliseerde ervaringe van swart mense regoor die wereld, probeer die tesis om hierdie tekste te analiseer sonder om te aanvaar dat die ervaringe van die karakters "verskillend" of "anders" is. Die eerste hoofstuk fokus hoofsaaklik op Morrison se Song of kommentaar te lewer op die spirituele ooreenkomste tussen 'n swart vroulike karakter uit Afrika en 'n Afro-Amerikaanse vroulike karakter. Hoofstuk twee fokus skerper op 'n Afrika, en spesifiek Zimbabwiese, vroulike ervaring gedurende die tweede onafhanklikheidsoorlog in daardie land.

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Many of Toni Morrison's African-American characters attempt to change their circumstances either by embracing the white dominant culture that surrounds them or by denying it. In this thesis I explore several ways in which the characters do just that-either embrace or deny the white culture's right to dominion over them. This thesis deals primarily with five of Toni Morrison's novels: The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise, Sula, and Tar Baby.

Bildungsroman in Contemporary Black Women's Fiction is a study of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both of these writers implement a newer version of the genre of Bildungsroman to reveal the complexities involved in coming of age for a young woman of color. Both novels have protagonists that struggle with racism, sexism, and classism as barriers to their identity formation. This study aims to reveal the ways in which multiple layers of oppression inhibit the progress of contemporary African-American female heroines in modem Bildungsroman. / Graduation date: 2002

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Secrets and silence appear frequently in the work of Toni Morrison. In three novels, The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise, she repeats a specific phrase that acts as a signal to the reader. Morrison three times writes, “Quiet as it’s kept” in her novels to alert readers to the particular significance secrets and silence play in these novels. Morrison portrays this secrecy and silence as a barrier to building strong communities and even a strong self-identity. While the phrase appears in the same form, with each subsequent appearance, Morrison takes the idea a step further. In each novel she demonstrates how breaking the silence and refusing to keep quiet is an act of healing or salvation and she expands this healing to be increasingly inclusive. What begins as a single voice breaking the silence in The Bluest Eye becomes a group of people sharing their secrets in Jazz, and finally an entire town coming to terms with the power of speaking up. This thesis looks at the secrets and their impact on characters in each novel and explores the progression of the power in refusing to keep quiet.

Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," as early as 1839, reveals an uneasiness about the space of the house. Most literary scholars accept that this anxiety exists and causes some tension, since it seems antithetical to another dominant motif, that of the power of place and the home as sanctuary. My critical persona, like Poe's narrator in "The House of Usher," looks into a dark, silent tarn and shudders to see in it not only the reflection of the House of Usher, but perhaps the whole of what is "Southern" in Southern Literature. Many characters who inhabit the worlds of Southern stories also inhabit houses that, like the House of Usher, are built on the faulty foundation of an ideological system that divides the world into inside(r)/outside(r) and along numerous other binary lines. The task of constructing the self in spaces that house such ideologies poses a challenge to the characters in the works under consideration in this study, and their success in doing so is dependant on their ability to speak authentically in the language of silence and to dwell instead of to just inhabit interior spaces. In my reading of Faulkner and Warren, this ideology of division is clearly to be at fault in the collapse of houses, just as it is seen to be in the House of Usher. This emphasis is especially conspicuous in several works, beginning with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and its (pre)text, "Evangeline." Warren carries the motif forward in his late novels, Flood and Meet Me in the Green Glen. I examine these works relative to spatial analysis and an aesthetic of absence, including an interpretation of silence as a mode of authentic saying. I then discuss these motifs as they are operating in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and finally take Song of Solomon as both an end and a beginning to these texts' concerns with collapsing structures of narrative and house.

The cultural and historical construction of African American identity in the United States has been closely tied to the dialectical relationship formed between sound and silence. This thesis examines the modernist and postmodernist representation of sound and silence in the African American novels Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen, and Jazz (1992), by Toni Morrison, as indicators of African American identity and racial oppression during the Harlem Renaissance. I analyze the soundscapes of both texts to expose the mobility of language, power, and space, especially as these soundscapes relate to the production of sound (both musical and non-musical) by African Americans, and the surveillance of these sounds by white audiences. Through my analysis of repetitive sound-images and embodied silence in Passing and Jazz, as well as textual representations of oral performance, I argue that there is harm in restricting African American voices to approved modes of audibility and/or limiting African American voices to one a singular narrative. This thesis introduces critics and theories from the disciplines of sound studies and African American studies, and applies the widely known theory of double consciousness, established by critic and author W.E.B. Du Bois, as the foundation for my literary and cultural analysis of sound in print. / Graduation date: 2013

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Broken bodies litter the landscape of African American women’s literature. Missing limbs and teeth, paralyzed appendages, lost hair, and deformities appear frequently in the works of authors like Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Pearl Cleage, and Octavia Butler. While many white authors also include broken bodies in their works, Hemingway’s preoccupation with synecdoche in terms of body parts perhaps being the most notable example, the motif permeates the tradition of African American women’s fiction like no other genre, appearing in the work of almost every major African American woman author. In the case of some authors, Morrison and Walker for example, broken bodies appear in every novel of their corpuses. In fact, every story in Walker’s first collection of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, features a broken body. Several questions arise from the ubiquity of this motif in the texts of African American women authors: Where did the motif originate? Why does the motif persist? Do the authors use the motif in the same way? What does the trail of broken bodies reveal about how African American women authors interpret the relationship between body and self? Surprisingly, given the prevalence of the motif and the number of critical comments on one or another text, no critic has essayed a comprehensive examination of the motif in African American literature. While this paper does not have the scope to cover the African American canon as a whole, it will discuss the motif across the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.