Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:45:33Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Luciana Duenha Dimitrov.pdf: 2042178 bytes, checksum: fc578e0ab9aa394548d39d8a17c560d8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-01-30 / In this study, racial prejudice is the basis of Toni Morrison s The bluest eye, despite not being the only aspect evidenced in the novel. What should be spotlighted as well is how the time is deconstructed; the evident presence of several discourses that can rise racism up, or bring it down; and the strong influence of colors in the conception of scenes that, in some of the narrative moments, can be associated with pictorial images. When the facets mentioned among many others are put together, there is the achievement of a great result in the novel s aesthetics. The main goal of this study is to exploit those aspects, looking forward to establishing those inseparable relations between the novel s main theme and its form, in order to consolidate their relevance both to the romance s construction and constitution. / Neste trabalho, o preconceito racial que fundamenta The bluest eye, de Toni Morrison, não é o único aspecto em destaque no romance; merece ser ressaltada igualmente a forma como se desconstrói o tempo, a coexistência de discursos que ora enaltecem, ora abominam o racismo, a forte influência de cores na concepção de cenas que, em muitos momentos, podem ser associadas a imagens pictóricas. A confluência desses e de outros tantos aspectos sem dúvida contribui para o excelente resultado estilístico alcançado na narrativa. O objetivo, aqui, é explorar tais aspectos, buscando essas relações indissociáveis entre o tema central e a forma, no intuíto de comprovar sua relevância para construção e constituição do romance.

La thèse s’attache à démontrer comment l’utilisation du folklore, en tant que discipline et que matériau, agit de façon subversive dans les travaux de Zora Neale Hurston et Toni Morrison. Un questionnement autour du folklore (nature et origine des objets d’étude, délimitation et positionnement de la discipline) donne un nouvel éclairage sur des problématiques porteuses dans le domaine littéraire, comme la définition des identités ou la mise en place des relations de pouvoir. Une approche transdisciplinaire permet, en plus de convoquer différents champs du savoir, d’observer de quelle manière ils peuvent s’infléchir entre eux. Par son double statut d’anthropologue et d’auteure de fiction, Hurston incarne une relation d’interdépendance et de dialogue entre matériau littéraire et folklorique. Son œuvre polymorphe, qui entremêle fiction et folklore, langue vernaculaire et écriture poétique, met en relief des enjeux épistémologiques, politiques et littéraires centraux dans l’œuvre de Morrison et permettent de mieux comprendre sa construction d’un discours orienté vers la pluralité et la performance. L’oralité, dans sa relation avec la littérature, constitue le point d’entrée de la recherche. La dynamique de variation, centrale à toute étude de la tradition orale est largement utilisée dans ces œuvres et va dans le sens d’une esthétique de la plasticité et de la polyphonie. La seconde partie s’intéresse au surnaturel et à la croyance qui, dans leur prise en charge, fonctionnent comme outil de subversion par la revalorisation des « savoirs discrédités ». Le positionnement de Hurston dans l’évolution du folklore en tant que discipline encourage à reconsidérer l’appellation de réalisme magique pour les romans de Morrison. Enfin, la mise en place d’un système d’interprétations alternatives et de sous-textes concurrents, en particulier en relation à la religion et aux contes, promeut la pluralité des possibilités herméneutiques qui agit pour la réhabilitation de discours minorés par des discriminations de classe, de race, de genre et de statut institutionnel. / The present work seeks to demonstrate how the use of folklore, both as a discipline and as objects, leads to subversion in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. A questioning of folklore (nature and origin of the items, definition of the discipline) sheds new light on literary issues such as identity formation and assignation or power relationships. In a transdiciplinary approach that goes beyond using resources from separate fields, this study aims at assessing how much they modify one another. Because she was both an anthropologist and a fiction writer, Hurston embodies the interaction between literary and folkloric materials. Her polymorphic work blends fiction with folklore and vernacular with poetic language. The epistemological, political and literary issues it reveals are crucial to Morrison’s writing and allow a better understanding of her crafting of a discourse oriented towards plurality and performance. The study of the interplay between orality and literature shows that variation, central to the oral tradition, infuses the corpus, promoting plurality and polyphony. The second part focuses on beliefs and the supernatural: their endorsement challenges a hierarchical order by giving value back to « discredited knowledge. » Hurston’s positioning within folklore as a discipline and its evolution leads to a reexamination of the concept of « magical realism » used for Morrison’s novels. Finally, a system of alternate interpretation and competing subtexts, especially concerning religion and folktales, supports multiplicity in the interpretative possibilities and enables the rehabilitation of forms of discourse depreciated because of social, racial, gender and institutional discriminations.

In my dissertation, "Narrative Representations (of Time) in the 20th Century Novel" I examine the way in which depictions of time intersect with narrative representation in the modern and postmodern novel. I specifically focus on the use of parentheses as a way to capture differing types of chronology in narrative. The parenthesis, in a purely visual sense, physically disrupts the act of reading by creating a type of barrier around one text, separating it from the main narrative. I argue that it is with this disruption that 20th century authors were able to experiment with depictions of time and the disruption of linear narrative. Borrowing Gerard Genette's phrase "temporal ellipses" I examine how authors in the 20th century used the "temporal parentheses" in order to convey different temporal experiences in narrative. For Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, the parenthesis works as a way of presenting simultaneity of experiences when spatially separated. For William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, the parenthesis creates a kind of compressed time, so that the past becomes a heavy burden upon the present, as represented by the way a narrative experience can be extended within parentheses. In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children the parenthesis is used to bridge and create a dialogue between the present moment of the telling and the past moment of the story. In Toni Morrison's Sula, the parenthesis calls attention to physical placement, representing the way in which personal identity is linked to physical place and the rejection of permanence in the novel.

This study examines trauma, particularly in the thematic contexts of the individual and the community as reflected in her novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. By utilizing the specific theoretical modes of new historicism and trauma theory, the veil of double consciousness imposed on African Americans is explicated and exposes various forms of trauma in the individual and the community. The unspoken atrocities experienced as a result of slavery, Jim Crow, and physical and sexual violence in many of Morrison’s novels, suggest the common thread of trauma. The particular traumas depicted in Morrison’s novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, damage agency, lead to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The scope of this study is limited to the novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved as they best illustrate trauma in Morrison’s characters and the damage it causes to agency, leading to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The literary theories of new historicism and psychoanalysis provide cultural and literary context for the novels and allow for a deeper rendering of the characteristics of trauma and provide the context for the term dynamic trauma. of oppression as a mean of dysfunction in the thematic These novels reveal a pathology of trauma disguised as normalcy in the African American community, which leads to disrupted lives, relationships, and communities. Morrison not only depicts these dysfunctional behaviors due to traumatic circumstances but also offers a remedy for the dysfunction—acceptance without acquiescence.

The aim of this essay is to explore motherhood in two postcolonial literary works by African American author Toni Morrison and British author Caryl Phillips, who was born in the Caribbean. The essay is based on Morrison’s award winning novel Beloved, which was published in 1987 and was inspired by the escaping African American slave Margareth Garner. It is set just after the American Civil War and the novels deals with the trauma of slavery from the perspective of Sethe, a slave who kills her own daughter to save her from slavery. The second novel on which this essay is based is Caryl Phillips’ novel Crossing the River, which was published 1993 and focused on the African diaspora from different perspectives. Crossing the River is a non-chronological narrative covering four different characters (three African American people and one white slave trader during the eighteenth century). This essay, however, only deals with the last of the four narratives depicting white British Joyce who mothers a child with African American soldier Travis. The hypothesis on which the essay is based is that the institution of American slavery has denied the female protagonists in the two novels, Sethe and Joyce, their maternal selves. The analysis revealed that both women suffer from racial domination, and race, or simply skin color, is what leads to the maternal loss of the two protagonists. Both authors depict the world of the colonizer and the colonized and they address the common pain and guilt shared by black as well as white people.

This essay is a close-reading study of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. The purpose of this essay is to investigate and describe Gérard Genette's narratological theories and their function in the novel when looking at how the story is told. The questions that are being answered are how flashbacks actually affect the chronological order of events and who the narrator is that’s telling the story. The methods that are being used in the report are a close-reading of Beloved and making a selection of previous research. The selected research will show an overview of some examples of areas and theories that has been used in other essays. In the summary it appears from the result of the analysis that flashbacks functions as explanations of the characters' thoughts or actions in the present and that the narrator most of the time is the character that is in a particular situation.

I argue that literary texts after 1980 use the fluid relationship between the physical world and the world of writing in order to present alternate versions of the body’s relationship to the mind. Examining works by Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Sarah Kane, and Shelley Jackson, I demonstrate the ways in which these texts reinterpret the relationship between mind and body by offering bodily metaphors for their character’s interior emotional lives; they compare this inner life to a pregnant mother, a sexual couple, and more. I emphasize the political implications of the kinds of bodies employed in these metaphors, setting this against the background of late twentieth century feminism. I read my primary texts alongside the work of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigary, and others, in order to chart the parallel projects of literature and theory in articulating the relationship between the body—especially, the female body—and our understandings of subjectivity and representation. Starting with the 1980s, when the second wave feminist movement suffered conservative backlash, and continuing through the development of the third wave, I examine literary theorizations of feminist concerns during a period of transition in the feminist movement itself.

從一九六○年代開始到七○年代初期，黑人性別變成種族論述的焦點。當時的黑人民權運動和後來黑權運動的男性領袖們聲稱黑人男性唯一真正受種族壓迫的受害者，不僅為白人也為那些堅強，獨立，自力更生的黑人女性所閹割，於是黑人問題等同於黑人男性的問題。他們主張黑人男性必須先獲得救贖，黑人種族才能得到救贖，因此，重新建構真正的黑人男性成為解決黑人問題的首要之道。黑人男性領袖們因而提倡重建父權社會，回歸傳統的性別特色，如此黑人男性才能重獲失去的男性尊嚴及權力，黑人族群也才能夠從種族壓迫的桎梏中解放。然而，此充滿男性沙文主義的論調受到莫莉森等黑人女作家及黑人女性主義者的質疑和批評。本文以莫莉森的三部小說（蘇拉，所羅門之歌，摯愛）為研究主體，藉由分析莫莉森的黑人男性角色來探討黑人男性在內化和追求白人男性定義的過程中，不僅造成其本身悲劇也破壞了與黑人女性的關係。莫莉森呼應黑人女性主義者主張黑人男性想突破困境唯有揚棄西方的性別角色重新建構具非洲意識的黑人男性特質，兼容兩性優點，拒絕西方父權思想並平等對待女性。如此，黑人男女才可能建立良好，永續以及和諧的互惠關係，為彼此也為黑人民族帶來救贖的希望。 / From the 1960s to the early 70s, black gender became the specific site for the discussion of race. At that time, black male leaders of Civil Rights Movement and Black Movement named the black man as the sole victim of white racism, because he was seen to be emasculated both by the white and the strong, independent, and self-sufficient black women. Hence, black people's problem was seen in terms of black masculinity. Therefore, black male leaders claimed that black men had to redeem their manhood so that black race could be redeemed. As a result, the reconstruction of a true black man was regarded as the only solution to the problem of black people. They advocated recuperation of partriarchy and a return to traditional gender roles. They asserted that only by doing so would black men reclaim their manhood and black people would be able to liberate from the bondage of racial oppression Nevertheless, the chauvinist philosophy permeating in the movement was questioned and criticized by Toni Morrison, other black women writers and black feminists. This thesis will focus on the examination of Morrison's black male characters in three of her novels-Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. Through an analysis of her black male characters, it attempts to show that black male's internalization of white gender ideology and his efforts to attain white masulinity not only lead to his own tragedy but ruin his relationship with black female. Therefore, Morrison echoes black feminists, asserting that the only way out for the black male is to reject white gender roles and patriachal attitude and to reconstruct his manhood in a nonpatriarchal fashion which stresses the black woman as his equal partners. Until then will black men and women be able to form nurturing, enduring and harmonious relationships which may empower black people to redeem their whole race from white racism.

<p>Using the novels, <em>The Bluest Eye, Sula </em>and <em>Song of Solomon</em>, the purpose of this essay is to examine Toni Morrison’s characters in the setting of the black community with emphasis on gender, participation in society and the class differences which exist within the black collective. All of the characters in the narratives exist in communities which are defined by the racial barriers formed by the surrounding white societies. Due to her concern with the inter-relatedness of race, gender and class as they are lived by the individuals, Morrison gives her characters physical and psychological qualities which enhance their chances for survival and fulfillment, thus leading to the survival of the black community. Through her characters in <em>The Bluest Eye, Sula </em>and<em> Song of Solomon</em>, Toni Morrison portrays the black community with reference to blackness and the inner struggles of the individual as well as the class differences and social structures within the collective. It can be concluded that the black community is an important part of today’s society as the contemporary individual must embrace his/her culture and heritage, which is found in the unity of the collective.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Audrey Goodman, committee chair; Pearl Mchaney, Christopher Kocela, committee members. Electronic text (99 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 25, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-99).