The purpose with this essay is to show how the protagonist in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved can be regarded as a traditional gothic heroine. Yet, she is given different roles and actions than a conventional gothic heroine. It is also argued in this essay that Morrison's heroine is given different qualities in order to reveal important messages. First, a short description of the plot is made in order to show the gothic elements in the novel. In the following, Sethe is dealt with in relation to four traditional gothic elements. These four all appear in the novel. These are: The heroine, the villain, the setting with the haunted house and the supernatural force. Then, Sethe as a different gothic heroine is analysed. Finally, Morrison's messages are brought up.

The purpose of this thesis was to contribute to a dialogue that considers the relationship between history, literature, and empathy as a literary affect. Specifically, I explored sites of literature’s transformative potential as it relates to cultural studies and the ethics of deconstruction. Via a deconstructive, post-colonial reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I considered how subjects in our current socio-political moment can feel history. Emerging from a post-structurally mediated engagement with history, signification, and feeling, I argued that empathy, as it is contentiously presented in the context of deconstruction, is not necessarily a reductive or essentialist approach towards relating or “being-with” an-other. Instead, I proposed that the act of reading historiographical novels that take constructions of the Atlantic Slave Trade to task might generate an affective empathy, which could in turn engender a more empathetic relationality and way of being-in-the-world.

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Black people, and blackness as a general symbol, has traditionally occupied a marginal or disadvantaged position in American literature, as opposed to representations of white people and whitness as a general symbol. Morrison's fiction in effect reverses this representation and positions white people in the position of the Other.

In this essay, the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison is observed using a working psychoanalytical approach. Story is observed as an important factor in engaging the reader on a personal level with the experience of trauma. By surveying Morrison’s use of imagery and language, this essay will examine how Morrison employs literary methods that imitate the psychological processes regarding how trauma is communicated to the waking state from the unconscious. The resulting testimony of the novel that arises as the result of these processes is also observed. This essay concludes that Morrison’s use of these literary methods functions to obligate the reader to involve themselves in the process of trauma and its resolution.

This study argues that Catholicism informs a major genre of African American literature in ways and with a significance that has gone largely unrecognized. Since their emergence in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary narratives of slavery have challenged the traditional historiography of American slavery, radically revising how we remember that "peculiar institution." These fictional works disrupt the form and content of slave autobiography, suggesting that the conventions of Enlightenment rationalism to which antebellum texts were bound could not adequately represent the experience of enslavement. Scholarship on the genre has thus tended to focus on the way it undermines the rationalizing impulse of Enlightenment discourse, which in the U.S. as well as in Europe was determined by the ideals of the Protestant Reformation. But while the scholarly attention to Protestantism has yielded valuable insights regarding the contemporary slave narrative’s critique of the "unreason" of slavery, it cannot account for the striking presence of the Catholic themes and images at the margins of these texts that this dissertation uncovers, nor for the way that the religion is imaginatively linked to radical moments of historical revision. I argue that Catholicism undergirds the imaginative ways the genre expresses the inexpressible horror of enslavement and the legacy of those horrors in the present day. Because of its historical association with irrationality, superstition, and an aberrant supernaturalism, Catholicism is thus marshaled—with justified political hesitation—in the contemporary slave narrative as an oppositional category of discourse through which African American authors break with the historiographical methods of the Enlightenment and, in particular, with the rationalization of slavery characterizing the period. Chapter One analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, Beloved and A Mercy, and her concept of "rememory." In Chapter Two, I examine the trope of spirit possession in Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Leon Forrest’s Two Wings to Veil My Face. My final two chapters address temporal disjuncture in contemporary narratives of slavery: Chapter Three comprises readings of Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, while in Chapter Four I focus on Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. / 2017-11-18T00:00:00Z

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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)