dialect is introduced. Toni Morrison's ce Walker's analyse the way in which Michael Žantovsk Nejmodřejší oči ) and Jiří The thesis is concluded with a part that focuses on Zora Neale Hurston's The novel's language is analysed compared to the novels by Walker and Morrison, and the analysis presents specifics of Hurston's portrayal of African American ejich oči

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.

In this paper I’m studying Toni Morrison’s short story Recitatif (2022) through the perspective of deconstruction. I theorise about conceptual meanings and differences that occur and can be found in structures. With deconstruction I can observe where in the text traces of metaphysics lay and what impact they have on the characters that live within the story. The study examines binary oppositions such as white and black; male and female; being rich and being poor; being somebody and being nobody. Questions are raised about found meaning in these categories, what they entail and say about perception of reality, and how all of these categories fit into one much bigger classification: the human. This study follows the text closely, exploring the story in chronological order and focuses on the two main characters, Twyla and Roberta, who symbolise two different ends of the binary opposition white and black skinned. Twyla and Roberta come to define themselves by their contrasts and that is also where deconstruction flows and exists. In the end, it’s the character Maggie – first seen as ”unimportant” – that comes to play a crucial part in the shaping of the story and Twyla and Roberta’s lives. Therefore, through deconstruction and its terms and notions, I further investigate Maggie’s character and her meaning and place in Recitatif. This study concludes with that while binary oppositions – and the perceptions they comprise – are firmly established around the characters and the world so are they not fully bound by them. / I den här uppsatsen genomför jag en läsning av Toni Morrisons novell Recitatif (2022) utifrån det teoretiska perspektivet dekonstruktion. Genom dekonstruktion synliggör, analyserar och problematiserar jag konceptuella världsuppfattningar och strukturer. Jag observerar var i texten metafysik finns och vilken påverkan det har på karaktärerna i berättelsen. I uppsatsen undersöks dikotomier och binära motsättningar såsom vit och svart; man och kvinna; rik och fattig; att vara betydelsefull och att vara oväsentlig. Till följd av dessa strukturella indelningar och inramningar väcks frågor om verklighetsuppfattning och mening samt att de därutöver ingår i en gemensam kategori: människan. Denna uppsats gör en textnära läsning och följer berättelsen i kronologisk ordning med fokus på de två huvudkaraktärerna, Twyla och Roberta, som symboliserar två olika sidor i den binära motsättningar vit och svart hudfärg. Twyla och Robertas mening och föreställning om omvälden samt identitet uppstår genom att deras likheter och olikheter ställs i kontrast mot varandra vilken dekonstruktion blottlägger. Till slut visar det sig dock att karaktären Maggie – som man först inte tror spelar en stor roll i novellen – har en betydande inverkan på berättelsen och hon kommer att omdefiniera både Tywlas och Robertas verklighetsuppfattning. Därför, genom dekonstruktionsperspektivet, undersöker jag Maggies karaktär och vilken funktion den fyller i Recitatif. Uppsatsen avslutas med slutsatsen att medan binära motsättningar – och de konceptuella världsuppfattningar som uppstår till följd av dem – starkt påverkar karaktärerna och världen är de dock inte helt och hållet bundna att förhålla sig efter dem.

Ce mémoire considère l'évolution des stéréotypes racistes et sexistes qui sont contestés dans trois œuvres littéraires afro-américaines, soit Not Without Laughter de Langston Hughes, The Bluest Eye de Toni Morrison et Citizen : An American Lyric de Claudia Rankine. L'analyse de ces livres vise à déterminer comment la double contrainte des femmes noires sous-tend les stéréotypes et préjugés qui sont apparus pendant l'esclavage et qui persistent dans la culture du vingt-et-unième siècle. Ces stéréotypes, tels que la Mammy, la Jezebel ou la femme en colère, ont été créés et maintenus afin de fournir une justification idéologique à la marginalisation et à l'exploitation des femmes noires. De plus, ils ont servi à soutenir les intérêts et objectifs de la société blanche patriarcale telle que manifestée aux États-Unis à travers le temps. Encore aujourd'hui, ces images discriminatoires et non représentatives contribuent à la perpétuation du racisme et du sexisme, et continuent de contrôler le corps, l'esprit, et la sexualité des femmes noires aux États-Unis. À travers une analyse chronologique des œuvres, publiées respectivement en 1930, 1970, et 2014, mon argumentaire postule que les performances de féminité noire étudiées dans chaque roman révèlent un désir de contester et réfuter ces stéréotypes, s'avérant ainsi des actes de résistance et d'autodétermination. Mon approche, éclairée par les théories de l'intersectionnalité et du féminisme noir, étudie la manière dont Hughes, Morrison, et Rankine revisitent, remettent en question, et déconstruisent les stéréotypes raciaux afin de mettre en évidence la multiplicité des identités féminines Afro-Américaines et ainsi, rejeter la fausse perception monolithique des femmes noires. / This thesis investigates the evolution of racist and sexist stereotypes forced onto black women in three African American works: Langston Hughes's Morrison's The Bluest Eye , and Claudia Rankine's Not Without Laughter Citizen: An American Lyric , Toni . The thesis aims to show the pervasiveness of the double bind of African American women that emerged during slavery and that persists in the culture of the twenty-first century as the Mammy, the Jezebel, or the angry black woman, among . Stereotypes, such others, were created and maintained to provide an ideological justification for the marginalization and exploitation of black women, which, in turn, were used to support the interests of the white mainstream and patriarchal society. To this day, these cont rolling images black female body, mind, and sexuality perpetuate racism and regulate the in the United States. Through a chronological analysis of the works, respectively published in 1930, 1970, and 2014, my argumentation posits that the chosen iterations of black womanhood talk back to their racial heritage, a vexed history of misrepresentation and misconception, thereby allowing for new performances and scripts of the black female self to be inscribed in culture. My approach to this thesis, grounded in theorizations related to intersectionality and black feminism, demonstrates that Hughes, Morrison, and Rankine revisit, challenge, and deconstruct racial stereotypes to highlight the multiplicity of African American female identities and, ultimately, reject the monolithic perception of black women.

Toni Morrison and Kathy Acker write their novels within the subversive feminist literary movement described by Helene Cixous in “Laugh of the Medusa”. Through Morrison’s Paradise and Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School they create a platform for women silenced by their bodily trauma to express and eventually liberate themselves from their traumatic pasts. These female writers are calling attention to the pandemic of misogyny-related violence and allowing assault survivors to speak through their pain.

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.

81 Abstract This thesis argues that motherhood as depicted in Toni Morrison's novels Song of Solomon, Beloved and A Mercy is a site of female empowerment. Its emancipating potential is set against the context of slavery and patriarchy found in the narratives and shows how mothers are able to resist oppressive structures and secure their children's well-being. Slavery practices severed family ties and caused its dismemberment by separating parents from their children. In the novels under study the recovery of those ties happens in an imaginative re-writing of history. Mother figures, such as Beloved's Sethe, come to terms with the re-embodiment of a painful familial past and deal with its traumatizing effects to be able to renounce it and move on. Others like Song of Solomon's Pilate cling to their past and act as mediators between the community's history and its descendants. A re-writing of history is urgent for African American writers and peoples who share slavery pasts, and who thus need to deal with their lasting legacies in the present. Motherhood is thus identified in several recurring patterns. Toni Morrison describes physical aspects of mothering from the point of view of the mother and uses the female body as a life-giving source that cancels the objectification of female slave bodies....

Tsang, Tak Fai. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-168). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgement --- p.iii / Dedication --- p.iv / Contents --- p.v / Chapter Chapter 1 - --- Introduction / Postmodernism and the poststructuralist view of enunciation / Chapter A.) --- What is Postmodernism? - Three Dimensions --- p.1 / Chapter B.) --- What constitutes a problem with Postmodernism? --- p.26 / Chapter C.) --- What is an alternative framework? --- p.33 / Chapter D.) --- Conclusion --- p.41 / Chapter Chapter 2 - --- Complementary relationships between discourses and subjects / One Hundred Years of Solitude - solitudes longing for dialogue / Chapter A.) --- Introduction - a Poetics of Contest --- p.42 / Chapter B.) --- The Insufficiency of Contest and Subversion --- p.60 / Chapter C.) --- One Hundred Years of Solitude - a longing for dialogue --- p.69 / Chapter D.) --- Conclusion: Dialogism and Liberal Humanism --- p.83 / Chapter Chapter 3 - --- Subject and History / Midnight's Children - dialogues of individual and national unity / Chapter A.) --- Hutcheon's view of subjectivity and history --- p.84 / Chapter B.) --- Hypothesis: a dialogical structure of discourses in Midnight's Children --- p.93 / Chapter C.) --- Conclusion: re-defining the liberal humanist subject --- p.115 / Chapter Chapter 4 - --- Subject and Politics / Beloved 226}0ؤ Agency and the articulation of a favourable identity for ex-slaves / Chapter A.) --- p.117 / Chapter B.) --- Problems of Hutcheońةs framework in Beloved --- p.131 / Chapter C.) --- "Modifying Hutcheońةs framework: Dialogism, Centres and Discourses" --- p.137 / Chapter D.) --- Conclusion: redefining postmodernist subjectivity --- p.149 / Chapter Chapter 5 - --- Conclusion / Reconfiguring Liberal Humanism - an enunciative basis / Chapter A.) --- Significance --- p.151 / Chapter B.) --- "The Enunciating Subject, The Enonce and Power" --- p.152 / Chapter C.) --- From Epistemology to Ethics --- p.156 / Chapter D.) --- Opening the Dialogue - the Performative --- p.158 / Chapter E.) --- A Forward Glance: Dialogue in a Postmodernity --- p.160 / Epilogue --- p.162 / Bibliography / Works Cited --- p.163 / Works Consulted --- p.167

The present study analyzes the way in which Toni Morrison, an established author, was covered by U.S. newspapers in the year before and year following her selection for Opraha's Book Club. The content analysis method was used in the research, and the results were used to test 6 hypotheses and 6 research questions. The results indicated that there was a significant increase in the total number of mentions of Toni Morrison in the year after her inclusion in Opraha's Book Club. The overwhelming trend that was seen in all variable comparisons was that while there were obviously more mentions of Toni Morrison post-Book Club, there were also increases and changes in the tone, page placement, and story placement of the mentions of Toni Morrison .

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, English Dept., 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.